Kid Icarus: Skyworld Campaign
by Ze Dybbuk
Summary: A novelization of the original Kid Icarus. When the wicked Medusa captures the gentle goddess Palutena and threatens her life, the angels and mortals alike believe their worlds are crumbling. Can Pit take on the staggering challenge of defeating her?
1. A Shadow and an Olive Tree

**Disclaimer:** Kid Icarus and all related to it are property of Nintendo, not me.

**Author's Note:** This story is a novelization of Kid Icarus. I tried to keep all the details mentioned in the game present, but did take quite a few "_artistic liberties_" when it came to explaining parts of the story that didn't make sense, including the addition of about a zillion (translation: nine) OCs. All of them are supporting characters, however; this story is about Pit. The first few chapters are mostly elaborate backstory, based loosely on the one provided in the original manual. This is the first fanfiction I took fairly seriously, so meaningful reviews and critique are always appreciated!

* * *

_The sun was hot, but it was cool in the shadows and that is where they lurked. Toad-skin prickled softly; breaths came slow; anticipation was fierce. No mortal eye or otherwise could yet spy them from their careful veil in the overworld foliage, and though the day was long they knew the end was approaching fast. They could _feel_ it._

* * *

There was a strange calm about the meadow today. Livy watched his breaths move the leaves of the olive tree and strained his ears to hear anything over his brother and sister bickering not far off. Secunda and Furianus were their names. Secunda was the middle child, and Livy was the youngest, although he also considered himself the least stupid, for truth or for falsehood. His own basket of olives was nearly full, but he hadn't seen Furianus pick a single one so far, and Secunda was trying to whack him in the head with her basket so he assumed she didn't have many either.

"Furianus! Knock it off!" Her voice was like hot rocks and she swung again, nearly losing her perch in the olive tree. Furianus just ducked and kept laughing; Livy squinted over at him to see the tail of a squirming mouse pinched in his fingers. The sun was getting low in the sky, orange and saucy, and Livy felt his entrails begin to knot.

"We gotta leave soon," he warbled at them, plucking another handful of olives so he wouldn't have to look at the sky, but it did little to calm him. "Guys!"

Secunda had finally wised up and gotten herself a handful of hard, unripe olives and flung them all at Furianus's head, and from the impressive rattle it made, she had had some successful hits. Furianus yelled and covered himself; the little mouse slipped out of his fingers and scampered away before it could be aimlessly tormented by some other towering monster. Secunda hastily began grabbing fistfuls of olives and throwing them into her basket. "Did you say something, Livy?"

"We gotta leave soon!" he cried again, too afraid to feel shame for how it showed in his voice. Distracting himself was no longer possible; he clung to the nearest branch, not wanting to look away, and definitely not wanting to pry his white hands from its steady familiarity.

His sister glanced at the sky and began to pick faster. Furianus had finally shaken off the smarts left by Secunda's unripe olives and started jumping and lunging at the branches that hung closest to the ground. Livy was motionless. He prayed, under his breath, to the gods and the goddesses and anyone who would listen that the two of them would get done quickly and that nothing would happen…

Secunda paused and examined her half-full basket, much of which was comprised of rotten berries and twigs, then decided she was content that that would be enough to keep her out of trouble and then barked at Furianus for him to hurry up. He dropped his latest olives into his basket, barely full enough to mask the bottom, and for a moment he looked regretful, but then walked over and stole a few handfuls from Livy. And Livy was so happy that they were finally leaving that he didn't say a thing to him.

Night fell fast, but the walk back was boisterous. Furianus may have lost his mouse, but that didn't stop him from finding other ways to annoy his sister.

"Half of these are rotten!" He was pawing through her basket, so she tried bucking it at him, but that only kept him back for a few minutes. "I think you just, like, threw half the damn tree in here, didn't you? This is a leaf!" He flourished it at her respectively. Secunda was impassive.

"Good boy," she said dryly, "That's a tricky one, isn't it?" And she bucked the basket at him again, this time smacking him in the nose.

The gravel path was blue with the darkness. The world around them was reduced to silhouettes. Livy saw his brother and sister only in puckered crescents where there was still illumination yet to show their highlights. He slunk up to Secunda and tightened his hand around her wrist. She looked down at him and smiled; he couldn't see it but he knew she was.

"It's dark," he whispered, "We stayed out too late."

"Oh, it's just a few minutes after sunset." She chided him, swung her arm back and forth casually, but there was a faint hint of unease in her voice. "We'll be back to the village soon enough, you'll see."

That was more than enough for Furianus, however. He stopped trying to rub the hurt from the red dink on the bridge of his nose and turned to them, smirking nefariously. "I wouldn't be _quite_ so sure about that. You _do_ know the stories, don't you?" He tiptoed around Secunda and put his face down to Livy's. "Night is when all the evil things crawl out of the underworld and stomp through the dark places up here where _we_ live. They lie in wait, in places wet and cold, flexing their slimy, knobby fingers, wanting just to grab some foolish mortal and drag him wailing back to hell, where they snip the flesh off his body and feed it to clicking hoards of beetles. Because that's all the underworld is; pain and screaming of dead mortal's souls; but that's all those monsters do it for, anyway. They wanna see us in agony, and all the while they'll be laughing their massive banshee shrieks and drowning out every hopeful memory you might have taken there with you…"

Furianus had maybe been about to continue, but Secunda whacked him in the head again and he backed away, grumbling like a struck dog. "Palutena!" she swore, "and you wonder why you still have to go pick olives like a child!"

"They make you pick olives, too…" he grumbled in a stuffy way, both hands holding his nose.

"_I_ choose to," Secunda said powerfully, "I _like_ picking olives. You're a _bully_. You're—" but then she stopped abruptly and froze in the center of the walkway, and for a moment Livy's heart caught in his throat, and he searched the road ahead furiously, already knowing full well in the pit that was hardening in his stomach, but praying with everything he had in him anyway…

His eyes touched it, and a long scream of terror nearly rose from his throat but he bit its head off. _Something_ was crouching on the pathway; massive, dark, a great knotted ball of wasted flesh and rotting skin that hung off of it in draping folds. The creature began to right itself, moving silently, so silently, and rolling out its gangly, twisted body. Nearly human but grotesquely misshapen limbs were unfurled, gnarled muscles in them working fervently. And then the creature rose its head, its broad, toad-like head with the mouth cut corner-to-corner in a jagged line across it, filled with yellow, curving, needle-teeth. It rolled its bulging eyes in its sockets and back around, and then, with a look that was clearly insane, it stared straight through Livy.

That was when he began to hear it, breathing with a metallic echo, its rheumy orange eyes never parting from the eyes of Livy. And for nearly a minute the three of them stood paralyzed, watching it, their chests tying themselves in knots. The orange eyes flickered in the darkness and bobbed back and forth as the creature crept forward on silent footsteps.

"It's getting closer!" Secunda finally choked out hoarsely, and her brothers' necks snapped over as they stared in her direction. She screamed, "Run!"

Livy never loosened his grip on Secunda's wrist as they tore back over the trail. He heard only the thunderous footfalls of his sister and his brother. At one point he stumbled and if not for the momentum he already had he would have tumbled down in a heap. Secunda's grip kept him righted, and he ran so fast only his tiptoes hit the ground. They stopped abruptly, he felt Furianus roughly grab him under the arms and hoist him upwards. Then there was a familiar strength under him and he realized they were in a tree. There was a breath in his ear, but it was only Secunda.

"What if that thing can climb trees?" Her voice was cracking with panic.

"We'll kill it, we'll kill that sonofabitch," but Furianus's voice was twisting as well, and on his last promise it broke entirely and he collapsed on his tree branch with his arms wrapped as tight around as they could go.

Livy had his eyes slammed shut, but it was so quiet, after awhile he opened them, glanced down at the trail and saw nothing. His pulse began to relax, and he leaned out over the branch, searching. Perhaps Furianus's story telling had only summoned a demon from their imaginations.

"Do you hear it?" he whispered, and Secunda whimpered and gripped his shoulder, shushing him desperately.

The orange eyes lashed open at the base of the tree and Secunda screamed. Livy stared down at it in horror and disbelief—the thing could move so silently! The wicked yellow cheshire-grin broadened across its evil face, and it crouched down before lunging up at them.

Something whizzed softly in the air, and a glowing bullet hit the demon broadside. The beast folded back on itself and fell out of the air, hissing like thin sheets of metal being rasped together. It hit the ground heavy; drought-dust rose into the air like smoke, twisting and dancing and obscuring the moon. Livy never looked away from the black veil where the demon struck the earth. He kept his eyes wide open, and they were thirsty in the darkness. The forest was silent again, and no shadows lurched along the floor, but they did not relax.

When Livy began to hear the sound again, he tried to convince himself that he was only imagining it, but when it did not diminish his hope began to dwindle. The metallic, rasping breaths of the demon, they were faster now. They grew louder by the moment, but still they couldn't see it. Furianus had crawled out as far along his branch as he could without it beginning to buckle under his weight; Secunda had both arms wrapped as well as she could around Livy and was whimpering all manner of pleas and prayers in a frantic and incoherent voice. The monster's voice was a deafening screech now. The tree rattled violently and Livy suddenly felt hot, rancid breath at his legs. His blood ran cold.

The creature opened its glowing cat eyes and for one moment Livy stared six inches into its face, with the bristle teeth just parting as it widened its mouth and stared at him with a wild, primal desire that was more chilling than any hatred. And then it was gone. Another glowing missile had knocked it from the tree, furious and hissing, and this time Livy could see it, an arrow, stuck clearly in the monster's flesh. There was a sound like hailfall and the demon screeched and reeled. Dully glowing arrows covered it like fish spines. A final angry hiss crawled out of its throat before it leapt away into the shadows, only this time, Livy felt, it would be gone for good.

For a long and stunned moment the three of them remained clinging to their tree. A part of Livy wanted to jump down and run for the village as fast as he could, but another part of him had already vowed never to set foot on that trail ever again. But eventually the decision was made for them.

"Hey guess what? Turns out they _can_ climb trees!" A mischievous voice rang out in the darkness and they jumped and looked around, but the speaker sauntered over to the base of the tree and glanced up in a sort of self-satisfied way. "So you gonna come down now, or not?"

Furianus said what the other two were thinking; this was one of the few traits that made it worth having him around: "Who the _hell_ are you?"

The tails of the glowing arrows poked out of a quiver thrown over his shoulder, and that helped to illuminate him a little. The first thing they noticed about him was that he was short; Secunda was probably taller than he was, if only by a few inches. The second thing they noticed was that he was a little strange looking. He was bent and squirrelly with messy auburn hair, but had a round, befreckled face like a kid and looked on the whole gangly and awkward, although that was offset in a strange way by his proud and confident swagger. The third thing they noticed, and they felt a little silly afterwards for noticing this last, was that he had wings.

He seemed a little miffed by Furianus's comment, stiffening his back and fluffing out the dowdy gray feathers on his massive wings. "Pit," he spat, "but that's _Captain_ Pit to you, _heathen_! Now get out of that tree!"

Furianus was still scared, and now angry, and, more than likely, a little embarrassed that he had to have been rescued by the likes of a scrawny, sass-mouthed angel. "No!"

Pit crossed his arms and looked up at him quizzically. "Why not?"

"How do we know you're not with _them_?"

Pit just stared at him dumbly for a moment. "Palutena!" he swore, exasperated, and he stomped over to the base of the tree and scrutinized it, fingertips working themselves over the rough tip of his bow. Then suddenly he wheeled it back behind himself and began striking the trunk with what looked like everything he had in him. "_Get…out…of…that…tree_!"

Apparently, he had quite a bit in him. Their tree shook, rattled and swayed more than any of them thought was possible for one of its girth. Livy clung to it for as long as he could, but eventually the rough bark was loosed from his grip. His chest was seized with the horror of falling, and he let slip a little cry of surprise, but the landing wasn't as rough as he'd expected. He opened his eyes. Pit had caught him on his shoulder, and done the same for Secunda, but hadn't, it seemed, thought to extend such hospitality to Furianus.

"Finally!" he cried in mock-relief (or maybe true relief) and sat Livy and Secunda down as Furianus tried to cough up some of the dust he'd inhaled. "Your village is only about half a mile from here. You'll be home in less than ten minutes." Pit nodded at them, then took a step back and spread his wings like he was going to fly away.

"Wait!" cried Livy, and he surprised himself nearly as much as the rest of them. He got up but only stumbled forward, and Pit chuckled at him.

"Listen, if you're worried about demons, don't be. They'll all be too scared now to come anywhere near this trail, at the very least for the rest of the night."

"It-it's not that," Livy continued, and the grin slipped away from Pit. For the first time, he regarded him with something like interest. That was too disconcerting for Livy though, and he couldn't look him in the eye. "Thank you for saving us," he whispered.

Pit's eyebrows rose, and for a long time he just regarded him quietly. "Well," he said at last, a little awkwardly, "Of course, you're very welcome."

Secunda seemed less rattled now that she'd seen Livy was brave enough to speak. "So you're one of Palutena's guard?"

He stood a little straighter and crossed his arms proudly. "A Captain!"

"You said that already," Furianus grumbled, rubbing at a raspberry on his elbow, but Pit ignored him.

"Palutena's good to the angels, isn't she? It's just, she watches out for us mortals, and whenever I heard the stories, I always hoped—"

"She is!" Pit nodded energetically, and behind that fluster of energy that danced through his face and body they watched as he carefully folded those great gray wings behind himself. "She's very dear to us! We love her more than…more than…" and he stopped then for a moment and just thought. After awhile he said, "Well, I guess you couldn't understand it, really."

As unsatisfying as this answer was, Secunda did not pursue that question any further. In fact, it seemed as though she had hardly listened, and all the while Pit had been talking she seemed to have been chewing on her tongue. "And her sister?" Secunda spat out at last, and a strange hush fell on Pit then. When the tense silence continued for a few moments she egged him on. "Her sister Medusa? I mean," and Secunda swallowed as she realized, too late, how tender a subject this was, "They tell us that she's a little…. But-but, she's not _really_, though, is she? Those are just stories, right?"

Their angelic companion was silent for a very long time, and when at last he spoke again his voice was subdued and he did not look them in the eyes. "She is…not the same as her sister."

The quiet drug out after that. Secunda shifted uncomfortably. "I'm sorry I brought it up."

"No, don't be!" he said quickly and his eyes snapped up towards them. "You mortals don't ask enough questions. And really, you ought to, because you don't know half of anything." A small smile cracked his face then. Livy thought at first that he was making fun of them again, but it wasn't a mirthful smile so much as it was just a slightly sad one.

"Oh," Pit said tiredly, unfurling his wings again and looking carefully up at the sky. The light of the stars glimmered on his wide eyes. "I really do gotta get out of here. Any longer and I'll be in big trouble..."

Livy asked, "Will you come back and see us again?"

"Of course," he snorted at him with such matter-of-fact calm conviction that between the three of them they couldn't muster a speck of doubt against it.


	2. Debate at the Palace

**Disclaimer:** I still don't own Kid Icarus, it's all Nintendo, baby.

**Author's Note:** Wowwee! If you've made it this far, I'd like to thank you for enjoying the first chapter enough to want to continue. This chapter is where stuff starts to get _really_ dicey. We'll meet some of Pit's friends and comrades and learn a little more about just how things are shakin' up there in Angel Land. If you know anything about Kid Icarus, you'll already know that things aren't shaking well at all...

Oh, and on a fun side note, I pulled the names for the mortal children from the textbook I used in high school Latin. It was filled with these passages we had to translate, and they were always about these three losers named Publius, Secunda, and Furianus. "Livy" is actually the name of an ancient poet. I used the name "Livy" instead of "Publius" just because my _hate_ of Publius is still. That. Intense.

On another fun side note, the only thing I know about ambrosia is that it's food. I have no idea if it is actually hot and served in a bowl like Kako seems to suggest, or if it is deep fried and served on a skewer like a corn dog. Now I'm hungry.

Ok go:

* * *

The wind was like liquid ice splashing down his back. His wings, in their messy frock of gray feathers, were warm as they beat the night, but they were the only parts of him that were. Pit shivered and his pulse pounded, but it wasn't from the chill. The mortal children and their questions asked in place of bigger questions; they were noble creatures made to suffer. How three young beings doomed to death could still manage to turn their eyes on the sky in wonder moved and astonished him. Their faces, in the same breath sullen and lively, despairing and hopeful, haunted him even now. Why any creature would turn to harm the human mortals, trusting enough to beg the help of gods and goddesses they knew of only from whispered stories, was a question that loomed over him many sleepless nights and wheezed hot breaths down his back.

It was a very dark night, the moon fully eclipsed by the drifting clouds of the skyworld, and it was only in a few bare patches that the precious pinpricks of starlight could peek through. Of any night for the mortals to have stayed out too long, this was possibly the worst. The darkness made the demons brave, but that wasn't the only reason it was a bad night. Palutena had chosen this night to call an assembly, and now, because of his brief foray down to the overworld, Pit was late.

He flew over many unnamed miles of cloud-mountains, darkened and formless from the night, before he finally caught a glimpse of the first temple of the Sky Palace. Darkness made the shadows deep and sharp of course, but on the whole the palace was relatively bright. Warm light flickered off the earthen bricks of the walls and floors from round glass lanterns hung about generously. Only the watch-angels were out at this hour, as well as the very few others like him who were in the process of rushing off somewhere else. Pit alighted on the mezzanine of the palace's central temple, disheartened at the sudden loss of that light feeling of freedom that only came with flying. He felt even heavier, though, once he saw who was watching this temple tonight.

The angel hurried over to him, her face stern and harried. Her feathers were an unusual color, faint copper with a rosy hint. Pit would have thought that she was very beautiful if she didn't always look as though she wanted to hit him.

He suppressed a sigh of misery, forced what he hoped was a polite smile and nodded at her. "Kako."

"You're late!" she spat at him, and in her storming almost came too close too fast and had to throw out her wings to keep from running into him. She scowled down at him. That was another thing Pit didn't like about Kako; she was taller than he was. Of course, _most_ of the angels were taller than he was, but he wanted to use everything he could to justify himself. "I don't know what goes through your head," she said to him, narrowing her eyes, "Darkest night of the bloody year, and you decide to stay out in it, worry the goddess sick, and late for a meeting, too!" She latched him by the wrist and marched him up the tall flight of stairs to the entrance.

"I had to _do_ something, Kako!" Pit said indignantly and tried to yank himself out of her grip. "A bunch of kids were getting jumped by a freaking demon, what am I supposed to do, just let it swallow em?"

Kako apparently wasn't listening to him, and instead was scrutinizing the grip she had on his ice-cold arm. "And it's not good to be out flying around this time of night, either. If you get sick, it's not my fault."

Pit was baffled. "How would that _ever_ be _your_ fault?" And then he tried to yank himself free again, hoping to catch her off guard, but Kako was iron-minded and Pit was unlucky. "Kako," he tried then, careful to restrain himself to a tone of reasonability, "You know, you're right, I'm late, so really, you ought to let me go, cuz this ain't helping."

"Absolutely not," and her grip tightened, "You need to go get a hot bowl of ambrosia before you go anywhere else."

If he was baffled before, now he was completely dumbfounded, and so much so that he couldn't even form a response more intelligent than "What, are you serious?"

"Yes!" she hissed at him, "I am not going to be the one who sends _you_ off cold and shivering to this meeting! Not _you_! Not the goddess's _favorite_ angel!"

Pit felt something drop in his chest at that comment and he looked up quickly at her scowling down at him, his mouth agape. "Kako…"

"Oh, for the love of Pal, Pit!" Kako snarled, "Just _go_!" And she pushed him roughly through the door and then shoved the massive thing shut again before he could even turn around.

He only humored the thought of getting a bowl of ambrosia for as long as it took him to consciously dismiss it as being completely idiotic. Kako's crankiness he chalked up to her general bitterness towards any angel who happened to be in better standing than she was, but a small part of him still hung its head in shame knowing full and glaringly well that she had not spoken any untruth. This certainly wasn't to say that he didn't enjoy Palutena's favor, but he did wish it wasn't so obvious. Many of the angels resented him, and he supposed, bitterly, that it was with good reason. Barely a nod was given them for their deeds. The goddess was obviously charmed by him, but it was not obvious to him, or to the others, or possibly even to the goddess herself _why_ that was so. He was ashamed of the baseless favoritism because he knew he did not deserve it, and the other angels like Kako seemed to know that as well.

The dark mood all that put him in as he ran head down towards his meeting didn't exactly brace him for a friendly encounter as he rounded a corner.

"Pit!" A clear voice was suddenly piping at him, and he looked behind himself but before his eyes could settle on the speaker, he crashed blindly into someone else and the two of them clattered to the floor.

A mess of black feathers filled his face and he choked and tried to bat them out of his eyes, but then a gentle hand took him under the arm, lifted him up and brushed him off. "Nice," she said, surprisingly levelly, and Pit looked up into her face.

"Tally!" he cried, and she smiled slightly. "I'm sorry! But I have to go, I'm—"

"Late for Palutena's meeting, we know," she rolled her eyes, "And she's not happy either, but that's just too bad, huh? Goddesses can't always get what they want either, huh?"

Pit wasn't sure where she was trying to go with that, and he was about to retaliate, but then the floor moaned and he forgot about it for a moment to look down curiously.

"Oh, poor Nil!" Tally crooned and bent to help the black-feathered angel Pit had plowed into to his feet. "Are you alright?"

Nil was thin and jittery, shifty-eyed and apparently always on edge, but he was also one of Pit's dearest friends and he felt a sudden pang of guilt for the bout of needless roughhousing he'd just put him through. Pit stepped over to him, lovingly straightened the bent feathers. "Sorry bout that."

"It-it's okay," Nil stammered and trembled. He always trembled. "It was, well, a little funny, actually. Watching that happen. Right up until, you know, you were crushing my ribcage."

Pit laughed, and that made Nil jump. "What are you two doing up so late?" He asked them then, glancing between Nil's timid brown eyes and Tally's clear blue ones.

Tally's expression faltered briefly, but she said, without much trepidation, "Nil couldn't sleep, so I brought him up here to show him where I work. He's been wanting to see it anyway, right?" Nil himself had been studying the floor as she spoke and he only nodded thickly at that comment.

Something stirred uneasily in Pit's belly, and his eyes caught Nil's with a look that was probably much sharper than he had wanted. "Wait, what's going—"

"Didn't you say you were late for a meeting?" Tally cut him off abruptly, casting him a severe look. Her soft wings, the color of lemon taffy, were ruffled with discontent. Pit was hurt, and confused, but he also realized that she was right, and as a result couldn't do much more than give her a nasty look, rush away, and use whatever time it took him to get to the conference hall to wonder on what might be troubling his friends.

_The usual_, he supposed glumly. The angels, after all, did not get to choose their god or goddess: Medusa was the one who commanded all of the black-feathered angels, and most of Nil's sorrows had been inflicted by her endless stream of torments and abuses. The three of them had made it a habit not to discuss her out in the open, however, because despite the wretched way she treated them all, Medusa still had a few loyal angels. Pit was always astonished by that, but Tally merely shrugged it off.

"Angels ain't good or bad, they just do whatever their goddess tells em to. You make em do a thousand awful things, they gotta justify it to themselves somehow, and for some of em, I guess, they just convince themselves the awful thing's the right thing and the right thing's the awful thing."

"It's so obvious, though," and Pit would shake his head, "How can they tell themselves things like that and not possibly feel like they're lying?"

That's when Tally would give him a long, low look. "You gotta go far to convince yourself that a thing you can only ever hope to wish for you've had all along."

That memory was his final thought before opening the great steel door of the conference hall and sliding inside. His footsteps were light and silent; he moved with the sound of dropping feathers. Hopefully needless attention wouldn't be drawn to him.

He was lucky, as it turned out, and the room was immersed in a heated argument.

"We have no authority over her!" A bandy-winged angel slammed his fists onto the table, his steely gaze piercing into an unwavering adversary. "Palutena and Medusa were originally granted prestige of equals; the same domain and the same power. They were to rule these people together. To set ourselves against Medusa would be to set ourselves against the will of the gods themselves."

"_They are not equals!_" The opposition was, if possible, even more livid, feathers arching with fury. "A disgusting, despicable, slanderous statement! Their names ought not be breathed in the same sentence together! You bring shame and dishonor on our goddess, Chly! Curse the gods and their flippant counsel; I don't care if they awarded her sister power or not, Palutena is one thousand times the ruler she will ever be!"

Chly's words struck sharp staccatos. "That's _not_ the _point_ we're debating! You can't just up and _overthrow_ a goddess! That's not how it works! I suppose you believe Medusa will be disinclined to fight back? You think she'll quietly turn over her power because we ask her to?" He leaned in within an inch of his opponent's face and whispered in a deceptively smooth undertone, "We're going to have a civil war on our hands, Ban."

"Maybe we'd ought to," Ban hissed back at him, and Chly's eyes narrowed, "Allowing Medusa to continue the way that she has been is not an option. Her people are suffering, her angels are suffering, and in case you've forgotten Chly, her people and her angels are _our_ people and _our_ angels. As long as the two of them share power here, all the good Palutena does will be undermined by the destructive habits of her sister."

"And you suggest war," Chly said coolly.

"No, I do not suggest _war_!"

"That's what _I _heard."

"I suggest _doing_ something, and if war's what it comes to, well."

"War is bad for angels, but it's devastating for mortals. You do remember the effects of the last war of the sacred realm, don't you?"

"I don't," Ban admitted after a long pause, "I was a child."

"Well."

Ban did not stay down for long. His anger stewed and he barked out again at Chly. "It doesn't make your point any more valid! Your plan is to sit and do nothing!"

Chly crossed his arms behind his head. "Nothing _is_ better than war." He chanced to glance around the room at that moment and his aquiline eyes fell on Pit. "Well!" Chly said sardonically, "I see our _dear_ friend Pit has finally decided to grace us with his presence this evening."

There was a shift in the room's aquamarine light and Pit looked up to see the goddess Palutena gracefully turning her head in his direction. "I was worried about you," she said gently, in her strange and faraway sort of voice that rang like falling water. "Why do you come late this evening?"

Pit kept his eyes on hers and tried to ignore the faces of the other angels that had turned towards him. "A demon was trying to kill some mortal children and I had to chase it away."

A red-haired angel who was sitting next to Chly rolled her eyes but the next instant she jumped along with most everyone in the room as Ban hit his fists against the table. "_You see that_?" he cried, and Chly glared at him. "That is _exactly_ the sort of thing I've been talking about! We're going to be seeing a lot more of that if we don't act now to get Medusa out of power!"

"You're suggesting that Medusa has been commanding demons," the red-haired angel said to him. It wasn't a question. "That is a strong allegation, Ban."

"Oh, stop pretending you don't know!" Ban shouted at her, "You know it, I know it, everyone in this palace _knows_ it, and it certainly is a dirty and uncomfortable fact, but we'd do damn well to accept it _now_ instead of waiting for her to throw a parade for them!"

"Calm yourself, Ban," Palutena said to him gently.

"The point isn't whether or not we _know_," and the red-haired angel gave Ban a severe and telling look, "the point is whether or not we can _prove_ it. Because it's not like she's about to admit it in front of Zeus."

Ban threw his hands up in a very real gesture of exasperation. "_Hang_ Zeus, that dipshit!"

The red-haired angel's only response to that was a raised eyebrow. Ban's comment had sent Pit snorting with laughter, and he tried very unsuccessfully to hide it from Chly, who glared at him openly.

"Zeus' support will be tantamount, Ban."

"Fey!" Ban cried at her, "Listen to me! Medusa is Zeus' _daughter_! It's not gonna matter if she eats an armful of babies in front of him, he is _never going to fight her_."

Fey just leaned back then and crossed her arms. "That's a fair point," she finally admitted, and Ban's shoulders slumped as if he were relieved and disappointed all at the same time. "Zeus is never going to help us, but if we can show him that Medusa is truly evil, he won't stand in our way when we do move to get rid of her."

Ban was apparently content with how the debate stood, because he made no comment after her. Chly, however, said, "To be honest, I'm not sure we can even count on that. Zeus is a kind of an…eccentric—"

"A dipshit," Ban cut him off, nodding energetically.

Chly glared at him and continued. "He's eccentric, and predicting his actions and impulses is unproductive and futile. Fey, what you actually just said was that you _hope_ he wouldn't stand in our way. Zeus is very unwilling to believe in things that he doesn't want to believe in; if he _were_ open-minded, it would have been obvious to him a long time ago that his daughter was evil, and we wouldn't be in this problem right now."

Fey was unreadable. "So what are you saying, Chly?"

"We _cannot_ count on Zeus' support; it may not even be _possible_ to overthrow Medusa; any attempt to do so would result in even _greater_ suffering for the mortals, and in case you have all forgotten, it's our job to protect them."

"The mortals are suffering _now_, Chly," Pit reminded him.

"They are only suffering some of the time," Chly corrected him. "Medusa is not power-hungry, she is only malicious. Things won't get any worse for anyone if we leave well enough alone. But if we anger her, things will get worse. Much, much worse."

"Don't act blind," Ban said and crossed his arms. "If things weren't getting worse, we wouldn't have called this meeting in the first place."

The silence drug out. "Alright then," Palutena said, and the four captains turned towards her to await the judgment. "What am I to understand? Fey and Ban, the two of you are for intervening in my sister's affairs. Chly, you support a more passive strategy. This is correct?"

The three of them nodded slowly, and so Palutena turned away from them and instead looked down at Pit. "And what about you, my dear? You have been unusually quiet."

Pit folded his arms across the table top, readjusted his wings and glanced sidelong at the three other angels before looking up into the deep turquoise eyes of his goddess. The looks on the faces of Ban, Chly and Fey had been disturbing. At the same time they were annoyed, apprehensive, desperate. They were looks that said, with a distressing ease, _You have more influence than the three of us could ever hope to have, even if we pooled together all our power, over all of our lifetimes. Whatever your opinion is, it must be the _correct_ opinion_.

"Well, Medusa is definitely evil," he began, and Ban and Fey nodded slightly, uncertainly. "But we've gotta do what's best for the humans too; that's our job. I know that Medusa was supposed to be working with us for all this time, and that's what makes it really bad. But really, it just feels like we're arguing over whether we should protect the mortals or just sit back and let them suffer. If this threat were coming from anywhere else, we would have dealt with it a long time ago."

Chly looked up at him slowly and after a short pause he asked, in an undertone soft enough to shield his comment from the ears of Palutena but rough enough so that the other two captains would hear as well, "You _do_ have a friend in Medusa's guard, though, don't you?"

"I do," he replied uncertainly, then added, "but what's it to you?"

"Nothing," Chly said brusquely, and he looked away and rapped his fingertips on the table, "I merely find it interesting, that's all."

Palutena's gaze was steadfast. "So you wish to stop Medusa, Pit?"

"I suppose so," he said in the same rattled voice with which he'd answered Chly.

For a long while Palutena was pensive, and she sat in consideration with her aquamarine eyes closed. However difficult this judgment may or may not have been, she exuded an aura only of serenity. Eventually she said, "Thank you for your input. I expected no less from you. Any of you."

"What do you want us to do then, Pal?" Pit asked her.

She replied, "Nothing."

The room was silent. This time, however, the emptiness carried not a tone of serenity but one of shock. Fey and Ban exchanged glances. Chly asked with trepidation: "My goddess?"

"I must first reason with my sister. She needs to understand the severity of her crimes. Only when she fully comprehends the extent and implications of her wickedness can we hope for her to change."

"Change?" Ban balked and parroted her out loud. Chly kicked him under the table and for a few moments he seemed hesitant but eventually continued, "She can't change, my goddess. She's evil."

Palutena was as unsurprised by this objection as by any, and she rebutted it calmly. "It is hard, it is rare, but it can happen. It is as possible for the evil to become good as it is for the good to become evil."

"With your pardon, my goddess," and Fey seemed uncomfortable and antsy, "it seems like a needlessly dangerous and foolhardy undertaking. We still have the upper hand right now because Medusa doesn't know we want to overthrow her. But if you have this…this…ah, little _chat_ with her—"

"It may be all the encouragement she needs," and by this point her captains' feathers were fluffed with worry, but Palutena gathered herself as if the case were obviously closed and she was ready to leave. "I cannot give up so quickly on my sister."

"But my goddess!" Fey cried in desperation, "She's given up on _you_!"

Palutena only gave her a sad and knowing smile and turned slowly to glide quietly away.

"Pal!" Pit said suddenly, and she stopped and craned her head back towards him. "Pal," he said, "If your…talk…doesn't work, and we have to throw Medusa out of Skyworld, what will happen to her angels?"

For the first time in their entire discussion, Palutena seemed truly at unease. But eventually she replied, "They must follow her, my dear. An angel must obey his goddess."


	3. It All Comes Crashing Down

**Disclaimer:** Believe it or not, Kid Icarus still belongs to Nintendo, and since I am not Nintendo, it therefore doesn't belong to me. Mm-kay?

**Author's Note:** I am absolutely not a fan of how this chapter ends. But it was getting way too long and my options were running out, and so here we are. Also, I debated forever whether or not to put the first chunk of this chapter in at all (the part where all the captains are talking). I left it in as more of an "eh, why not" kind of thing as opposed to because it actually adds to the story, so if you really think it would be better without, just let me know and I can scrap it. There's enough redundency in the rest for readers to figure out what's going on, anyway. Maybe I should just take the redundencies out instead...

Since the semester's coming to a close, I will hopefully be able to update more than...once every two months...so hopefully I'll really be able to get this story rolling!

Kid Icarus researcher, thank you very much for your support! It means a lot to me. I'll do my best to stay true to the story and spirit of the game!

* * *

It was a long time after Palutena had left and the room had settled beyond completely into its previous state of calm. The captains were silent. Pit looked around at them. Fey had her eyes down and she was absently tracing the wood grain of the conference table. Chly had his arms crossed over the table and had settled his mouth onto one wrist. Only Ban returned the look, but his was empty.

There was nothing more to be done, nothing more that really _could_ be done, and Pit got to his feet, silently, avoiding even a klutzy rattle of feathers. He had taken a step back when Fey said quietly, "I guess that's it, then."

"I guess it is," Ban agreed after a brief pause. He glanced around and made a tight smile, "Does anyone else feel like they've just seen their death sentence?" he joked darkly. His smile faded as he saw the others were somber.

"You know what we ought to do," Fey said after awhile, and only the faintest suggestion of hope was enough to make the others turn their eyes on her. "We ought to prepare for what's gonna happen."

"I thought you were open-minded," Chly grumbled at her pestilently, and for one ridiculous moment Pit was reminded of the heathen child Furianus.

"Bureaucracy demands a forced and false kind of open-mindedness," Fey snapped back at him as if the matter were obvious, "I 'know' as well as you do that this talk of Palutena's is going to be a massive failure."

Pit cocked his head. "So what are we gonna do about it?"

Fey thought for a minute. "Chly, you assemble the troops. But be discreet about it, alright, otherwise there's no point at all. Ban, you go around and warn all the angels you can. But _only_ Palutena's angels, of course, we can't have any possibility that this will leak out, right? …Actually, Ban, I think maybe _I'll_ go around and warn the angels, okay?"

Ban was indignant. "What! Why!? I can handle it!"

"Oh, I'm…_sure_ you can. I just…want to make extra sure, huh?"

Ban snorted and crossed his arms. "This is just like you , you know, you'll stick up for me in front of the goddess, but you really think I'm an _idiot_, don't you?"

"No, no, of _course_ not, I'm just being…picky. Ban, why don't you go down to the overworld and warn all the _mortals_ instead, huh? That's a bigger job anyway."

Ban knew perfectly well that it certainly _wasn't_ a more important job, but he also loved to cavort with the mortals because of how they were struck speechless by the presence of an angel and how they always showered them with attention and praise, so he kept his mouth shut.

"And Pit," Fey said finally, exasperatedly, and she kneaded her brow, "You ought to go one last time and try to talk the goddess out of attempting to convert Medusa." Before he had a chance to protest, she added wearily, "If Palutena is going to listen to anyone, she's going to listen to you."

"She doesn't listen to me all the time, you know. She's a goddess, she does what she wants."

"I'm not trying to vilify you, Pit," and Pit had a feeling she was being about as honest as when she told Ban that she didn't think he was an idiot, "But that really is the best chance we have of avoiding this disaster altogether."

Pit already knew he couldn't say anything that would convince Palutena to abandon her hope for Medusa. To soothe Fey however, he promised that he would talk to her anyway.

"Alright, then let's go," she said emphatically, mostly for the benefit of Ban, who was still sitting while Chly had already leapt to his feet and Pit was walking away.

"And there's no telling how much time we have until everything falls apart, either," Chly put in over his shoulder, "So look sharp!"

* * *

The morning's first sunlight was just beginning to cross the floors of the palace, long dark shadows woven between ribbons of radiant gold. Pit was surprised to see that Nil and Tally were still up. He found them sitting cross-legged in a dim alcove off one of the side arcades. Their backs were bent with sleeplessness, their wings drooping and the feathers ruffled. As he was coming up on them it took a while for either one to notice. He first heard Tally speaking in low, exhausted whispers:

"…hadn't heard much, but he always spoke like there wasn't much camaraderie among you guys."

"Yeah, well, there is," Nil replied stiffly, although that was more a mark of weariness than defensiveness. "Well, I guess, among some of em, anyways. Most of us, figure, we're not hot about it, it doesn't change anything, anyway. But there is _some_ of it. Camaraderie, that is."

"Enough of it to be that big of a deal?"

"Yeah. It gets bad. Stay away from it, mostly, or, at least, you try to. It chases you. I like the loud ones, you know, they're better. Always know exactly what you're getting, at least. Know to not say nothing around em. It's the lurkers you gotta worry about. They stalk you, quiet places, pick through your papers, watch you at night, wait for you to talk in your sleep. They're the scary ones. They get one thing on an angel, that's the last thing you ever hear about him."

Tally's voice was barely audible. "They don't know anything about you, do they?"

"I don't think. I hope not. I'm pretty careful, don't think they could find anything really, except you and Pit. And even _that's_ not _awful_, you gotta understand, I mean, they don't _like_ it if you got friends on Palutena's side, but they can't really _do_ anything about it either. We're _supposed_ to be on the same side anyway, huh? _Supposed_ to be."

"Supposed to be," Tally repeated and sighed.

Pit cleared his throat suddenly and asked, "What's going on here, now?"

He startled the two of them so thoroughly that they threw their wings out like frightened birds. Nil moaned and slumped back down against the alcove wall. "Aw, _Zeus_, Pit, make some noise next time!"

Tally looked at him curiously. "You guys just got out of that meeting, huh?" He nodded. "So what was the deal with that?"

He told them most everything, except for the final question he had asked Palutena before she had left. With Nil's eyes on him, Pit felt suddenly unable to utter that.

The two of them had watched attentively throughout his recounting, nodding with appreciation at the progression of events, but neither was riled to speak until the very end when he told them about Palutena's last-ditch effort to save Medusa.

"You can't be serious!" Tally cried, causing Nil and Pit to flinch. "I mean, sure, of course, it's a noble effort and all, whatever. But _really_, it's not going to do anybody any good at all! You don't think she can actually _talk_ Medusa into being good, do you?" she asked Pit quickly.

"Yeah," he snorted, and rolled his eyes, "We'd have as good a chance trying to tame the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell!"

"Then why…?"

"We don't know." He spoke before she could finish the question. "We tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn't listen to us. I don't know. She's always had good judgment before, so she must know what she's doing…"

He stopped on a note of uncertainty, and sat rigid as if he had another feral word poised on his tongue that he must keep locked inside his mouth as if it were too dangerous to be allowed to walk free.

"But…?" Nil suggested, nodding, encouraging.

Pit bit his lip. "Fey had an idea. If we already know how Pal's talk is going to end, the best we can do is be prepared enough to still have something of an advantage when Medusa finds out. Chly's pulling the guard together, Ban's down telling all the mortals what's happening, and Fey is working to get the word around to all of Palutena's angels. I'm…I'm supposed to go one last time and try to talk Pal out of it."

Tally was staring at him in disbelief. "You guys are going behind her back!" she said in a slight tone of accusation.

He shrugged. "I guess we are. But hey, what else are we gonna do, wait around for Medusa to kill us?" Tally didn't say anything, so he added, "If you see anybody, you'd better be sure to tell them that things might be getting dangerous around here soon. But make sure none of Medusa's angels hear about it. Otherwise our cover will be blown and everything will have been for nothing."

"What about me?" Nil asked.

As Pit had told the story, he hadn't been thinking about who Nil was and what he was connected to. He had remembered to leave out the details that would protect Nil, but not the details that would protect himself from Nil. But after a moment seized with horrible panic, he frantically reminded himself that this was because he did not _need_ to protect himself from Nil.

"You're different," Pit said to him, and he wished, in a long moment of nausea, that he wasn't trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince Nil. "I can trust you. I know you want Medusa gone as much as we do. I know you won't betray us."

Nil didn't say anything. Pit was eager to change the subject. "What were the two of you up half the night talking about, anyway?"

"Just what we told you," Tally said in a voice that was very slightly too loud, "I'm a historian, Pit, and Nil wanted me to show him some of the artifacts I'm in charge of." She lowered her voice down to one step above silence: "He thinks that Medusa suspects him of disloyalty."

She spoke loudly again. "They've been letting me work with our Sacred Treasures lately, and that really is an honor and a privilege since they normally do a good job of keeping them well locked away and hidden from thieves." Then she said: "I've been trying to help him figure out if he's really been disloyal or not, or if she could possibly know anyway."

Again she was loud and casual. "The Mirror Shield, now, that once belonged to a great mortal hero named Perseus. The Light Arrows were a gift from Palutena's friend, the god Phoebus. As for that last treasure, well, you would never believe the story behind that anyway." Then she said: "You know what they do to disloyal angels, don't you?"

All the things Tally said Pit had already as good as suspected, but hearing them spoken aloud did nothing to mollify him. He had no chance to react however; in the next moment he had all but jumped out of his skin.

"_NIL!_" Pit wheeled and glared, but he did not recognize the angel who had shouted. He could see enough to know that he was one of Medusa's though; the feathers on his wings were black as tar. He could also see enough, by the angel's smirking look of triumph, to know that he was no friend of anyone.

"Now, Nil," their interloper trilled in false sweetness, creeping forward on all fours as if the weight of his great shady wings was too much for him to right himself, "You of all people should know better than to be…_dawdling_ about, when the goddess is looking for you."

"L-looking for me?" Nil croaked. The gaunt smile of the black-feathered angel widened. "Why would she be looking for me?"

"Oh, I wouldn't know, dear Nil," the angel said in a sing-song, lackadaisical way. "I don't question our beloved goddess, I merely do her bidding. There's a little something to be said for faith and loyalty, don't you think? What is suffering after all but a trivial blemish on the face of immortal glory? She wants you to meet her. Quickly, because our goddess is very important and she has many important engagements upon which you must not impede. She is meeting with her sister today, and oh I _dearly _hope she'll put that thin-headed wretch in her place."

Pit and Tally had leapt to their feet, feathers bristling with anger. "You won't talk about Palutena that way!" Pit growled at him, "She's the only one in this palace who ever did right by anyone!"

The angel only laughed at them and took Nil by the wrist as he trembled from uncertainty. "You all are very obvious, aren't you? I suppose I shouldn't expect you to understand. One day maybe you can explain to me what it was like to be the spiritual slave to an empty shell of a goddess."

He marched Nil away from them then, and they watched until the form of his trembling body passed out of view of their arcade. Pit was still furious, and he paced fervently across the same six feet of floor, a red and wild look in his eyes. Tally watched him with concern. "Pit, what are you going to--"

"I'll tell you what!" He said sharply, and Tally jumped. "I'm gonna do what I'm supposed to be doing!" He paused and stared down the hallway where Nil and the black-feathered angel had left. "The way he was talking, it sounds like I don't have much time left to head off Pal before she gets to Medusa."

Tally shook her head in dismay, but all she said was, "Be careful."

* * *

Pit had good instincts. It did not take him terribly long to find Palutena. She was alone in an old and deserted part of the palace, hallways long untraveled by anyone for many years. She was not doing anything, simply standing and looking out across a swirling sea of gray clouds.

She had not looked up as he had begun walking towards her, but she said, "Hello, my dear. Why are you on edge?"

"Pal," he said and bowed quickly. "I wanted to talk to you."

"Very well, my dear. Please, talk."

He spoke. His points were not significantly different from the ones Chly, Fey, and Ban had already brought up at the meeting, and he already knew that they would not convince her, but he tried anyway, because it had to be done. Palutena listened, watching him serenely, eyes moving slowly with comprehension. She did not interrupt him. When he was quiet she spoke.

"I understand why you wish that I won't do this. If Medusa remains ignorant, it will be easy to defeat her. But if we kill her while she does not understand, she will become a hero to darkness. She believes her ideology is unflawed, my dear, and if we kill her while she and her supporters still believe it to be unflawed, it will only strengthen their convictions and prove to them that we are the wrong ones. I think perhaps, my dear, that you are right in that saving Medusa is too much to hope for. But there is something greater still that we absolutely _must_ save; the idea that there is nothing noble in suffering, the standard that the infliction of pain and torment is not a means to any truly good end. My dear, the arrogance of people like Medusa and the blind faith of their followers is what perpetuates such things in the first place. Medusa must see the black of her own evil before she dies, or else suffering will be hailed as what is noble and righteous."

Pit was silent, he stood turning and twisting the ideas about his head. They frightened him. He could also not help it but to think about how Palutena made defeating Medusa sound like the easy part of this plan, and he already knew very well that that wouldn't be the case. He did not fully understand any of it, except that Palutena was never going to be convinced otherwise by any argument, and he was tired of speaking in vain. So instead he asked, "How are you going to make her understand?"

"Oh, there are ways, my dear." Palutena smiled mischievously. That was rare for her. Normally she was completely stoic. "I trust that you've met Medusa before."

"Of course."

"And what did you learn about her?"

Pit sputtered. There was one thing about Medusa that had astonished him beyond all others, but he could not force himself to say it. Not to Pal.

Palutena let him stammer incoherently for a few long moments before she said quietly, "She's beautiful, isn't she?"

Pit blushed. "I…well, she's…yeah, Pal, she is."

"Why did that surprise you so much?"

"I don't…well...because before, I had always imagined her as ugly."

"Why?"

The answer felt so obvious that he thought for sure she must have been expecting a different one. "Because she's evil?"

Palutena nodded serenely. Pit let the tension out of his wings and they slapped down against his back. He was still confused.

"Isn't it interesting," Pal said gently to her companion and his cocked head, "That one always seems to imagine good people as being beautiful and bad ones as ugly? Now of course we know it doesn't always work out that way, as you learned with Medusa herself, and more good people have been needlessly vilified for their poor looks than I care to count. But wouldn't it simplify so much, my dear, if we could look at someone's face and know just by that the condition of their heart?"

Pit might have responded, but it was then he noticed that a long, dark shadow had been cast between them like an obsidian wedge. Horror gripped him, and he turned slowly – because he could not bring himself to move any faster – and looked into the wicked eyes of Medusa.

To call her merely beautiful was an obscene understatement. Her build was slender and graceful like a desert cat. She moved as water did. Her hair was perfectly black, impeccably smooth, soft and knotless. It gleamed with such brilliance that it still might have shone even in pure darkness. Her skin was like polished marble; cream smooth and without a single blemish. But the most startling thing about her was her gaze. Medusa's eyes, like the rest of her, were speechlessly beautiful, dark blue like the midnight sky. There was something about them that was distinctly different than the rest of her, however. The eyes were fierce, sharp. The black stars reaching out from her pupil reminded Pit of demon's jaws cracked wide and ready to swallow him whole. It felt as though something was gripping his chest and slowly squeezing harder as he stared into them. He couldn't look away. He knew only that he did not ever, _ever_, want to see the darkness that lurked just behind without the eyes in front to filter it down.

Medusa slowly smiled, and it was a keen, graceful, beautiful smile, but at the same time sent wicked fear through Pit's heart. "You told me, sister," Medusa said, her voice rich and resonant, "That we would be meeting here _alone_."

"Forgive me," said Palutena, and she stepped between Medusa and Pit. Pit was immediately released from Medusa's grip and he staggered backwards, gasping with relief. "I didn't anticipate that my captain would track me down so insistently."

"Captain," Medusa said skeptically. She glanced around her sister and snorted. "Of course. If you say so. Well Palutena, if you have something to say to me, by all means, please say it. I can't humor you for all hours of the day, there are things I must do."

"I only wanted to ask you something."

"Then ask it."

"There has been quite a problem lately, in the overworld, with demons." Medusa froze. The full fierceness of her gaze focused on Palutena, but she was unaffected. "What do you know about that?"

Medusa stared at her for a long time and said nothing. Eventually her cheeks hardened and her lips pulled apart with a mirthless smile. Her eyes were still daggers. Slowly she ran her tongue over her teeth. "Nothing," she said.

"Nothing," Palutena repeated.

"Nothing, sister."

Palutena stared at her. Her features were hard. "Medusa, you more than _know_ about this."

Medusa's smile only broadened. After another long, thoughtful pause her voice slowly thrummed back into life. "Are you never disgusted," she said in a voice that was almost a whisper, and a voice that sent black chills down Pit's spine, "by the very things you must use your power for? Palutena, we are the most brilliant, strong beings in this world, and we are expected to use our power to strike matches when bumbling old fools are afraid of the dark and to wipe the snot off of children's noses. I will not force such paltry tasks on either myself or my angels. How great could we be, sister, if not for the mortals? The perfect magnificence of the sacred realm could only ever be achieved by freeing ourselves of them forever. We could find that higher light, it could be ours. But not with them."

Palutena's eyes had narrowed. "And how exactly would you go about freeing yourself of them?"

"_Ourselves_, sister." Medusa flicked her eyebrows casually. "And how does one go about freeing oneself of any squirming, filthy creatures? By stomping on them."

They were silent. Pit had never been so horrified; not of what Medusa was saying, but of the rage that was pounding inside Palutena, the kind of rage he had never seen in her, the kind of rage he had never seen in anyone, the kind of range that until now he had been unable to even imagine. Medusa was oblivious to it. She tilted her head, grinning in the delight of her own speech.

"Come to me, Medusa," Palutena said slowly, deliberately.

"Oh?" Medusa said in mock surprise, "Decided that you like how I think after all?"

"Come here, Medusa," Palutena repeated, "Let your sister give you a kiss."

Medusa smirked. She rocked forward and knelt lazily before Palutena, exposing her brow and watching with a keenly triumphant, expectant eye.

Palutena grabbed her by the scalp and pulled her forward, planting her fire-hot lips against Medusa's forehead. Medusa cried out, first from surprise, but then another long, bloodcurdling scream pulled out of her and she crumpled to the floor, writhing in agony. Her flesh began to knot and convulse. The skin darkened with warts and scales and in some places ruptured into long, oozing wounds.

The door at the end of the hallway crashed open, and the black-feathered angel who had earlier whisked Nil away roared at the sight of his goddess. He rushed to her, tried to take her by the wrists, all the while moaning and simpering incoherently, "What's the matter with her? What have you done to her?"

Palutena was impassive, her eyes severe, unyielding. "Now her body will mirror her heart."

Medusa hissed like a feral cat and struck the angel across his face, leaving a trail of black gashes where her nails had cut him. The angel did not cry out. He only dropped her wrists and turned slowly towards Pit and Palutena. "I'll kill you," he said, his voice startlingly calm, "I'll kill you both!"

He had reached a fury-trembling hand halfway up to his bow, but by that time Pit had already leapt upon him and pinned him to the floor. "_You won't touch her_!" His face was an inch away from the black-feathered angel's. His wounds stank, as if the flesh underneath had been rotted and dead long before Medusa's nails had ever broken the skin.

The angel laughed at him again, and Pit tightened his grip on his throat. "Oh," the angel still managed to garble out, "I wouldn't be so sure about that, kid."

Something whizzed by overhead, missing his wings by less than an inch. Pit snapped his head towards the open arch-windows and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

It was Nil. He hovered just outside above the swirling gray clouds, bow nocked and ready to fire another arrow. Around him flew the sorts of creatures Pit had only ever seen in his nightmares, all cackling and snarling and spitting fire and acid. Pit was so shocked that for a moment he forgot about the black-feathered angel. He took that chance to shove him off and strike Pit in the head with the broadside of his bow.

Pit staggered backwards, his vision darkening, but he was able to dodge the angel's next attack and land a strike of his own on the angel's neck. He crumpled to the floor, clutching at his breaths. Pit stepped away, panting, and wheeled to face his goddess and cry out for her to run, but at the same time there was a sickening twang from Nil's bow. Pit was only fast enough to see half a black-stalked arrow buried in Palutena's side.

Something vicious burned in his chest. A roar of pain and fury the likes of which Pit had never conceived was streaming out of him. He leapt off the arched window and caught Nil in midair . The two of them tumbled and flipped through the air in a tangled knot of flesh and feathers. Pit was blinded by rage and the closeness of the encounter. He struck every square inch of Nil that he could get a hold of.

"_What have you done!?_" he screamed into his face. The cold air howled past Pit's ears and he couldn't have heard Nil's response even if he had said anything. He clutched at his collarbone as hard as he could; he could feel Nil's pulse pounding frantically. "Do you even realize what you've just done!?"

Nil said nothing, and only kicked Pit off, threw his wings open and rocketed back up towards the palace. By the time Pit had untangled himself and caught the air, he had lost him. He took off furiously all the same.

The mezzanine was in chaos. Kako was zigzagging across the stone platform, shouting commands at any angel she saw, whether they were in the guard or not. Hundreds of toad-sized, grinning, demonesque monsters were hovering about everywhere. A few landed on the platform, clumsily waddling and gurgling. They appeared threatless, until Pit saw one open its mouth, the hinge of the jaw making a nearly 180 degree angle, and spit a sticky green slime. It bubbled and steamed violently where it hit the stone. A young angel not far off was wailing and desperately wrestling to untangle a black, eel-like creature from around his head. Kako ran to him, yanked the monster off and flung it out into the clouds.

"Kako!" Pit shouted at her, running across the platform. His voice nearly drowned in the bedlam. "Where are the captains?"

"What?"

"Fey! Ban! Chly! Have you seen them?"

Kako jabbed a finger out towards the distance. It was bright. Pit could barely see a few, black, bug-sized creatures hovering, almost fully eclipsed by the glow of the sun.

"What should I do, Pit?" she cried at him.

Pit honestly didn't know. Equal urges to command her to flee and to command her to fight warred in his mind, along with the dizzying anxiety that every second could be causing them irreversible damage. "Do whatever seems right!" was all he could think to say, and he charged away towards his co-captains, flapping his wings before he had ever left the mezzanine.

The air was blunt against his face from the force of flight. Details of the distant fighting angels came slowly into focus as he came closer. Fey and Ban were two of them. Three others were black-feathered angels from Medusa's guard.

Pit tackled the closest angel out of the air just before he was about to jump Fey. It fell away towards the ground, stunned and winded, but it would probably catch itself before it hit and come back.

"Where have you _been_?" Ban screamed at him.

Pit was livid, and had Ban been any closer he probably would have attacked him. "Where have _I_ been?" he spat, "I've been chasing the angel who shot Pal! Hey Fey, _great_ job pulling the guard together! Where are the centurions? Where is _anybody_?"

"They're with Chly! Don't you talk to me that way, Pit! They're chasing Medusa!"

"You let Medusa get away? _How did you let Medusa get away_!?"

"Oh shut up, Pit, _you_ let her get away! Go jumping after some goddamn grunt when the goddess is injured and left alone with Medusa and her right-hand angel, what did you _think_ was going to happen? If it hadn't been for Chly, we'd have no idea right now where she'd taken Palutena—"

"_What did you just say!?_" Pit screamed as she dodged a black arrow from one of the two other angels and fired one back in retaliation.

"You heard her!" Ban shouted, his voice breaking as he turned to face them for the first time. He had been doing most of the fighting, and his back and arms glistened with sweat and blood. His eyes were red with madness; his under-eyes were stained from sobbing. "They took her! You just ran away and _let_ them take her! Pit, they'll _kill_ her! They'll kill our goddess! How could you do that, Pit? _How could you do that to her_!?"

One of the black-feathered angels wound back with his sword, and before Fey or Pit could cry out to him, he had slashed the blade over Ban's back. Crimson raindrops burst and fell; red-stained feathers twisted carefully towards the earth like dropped maple samaras. Ban gasped and arched. His wings failed. Fey darted forward and caught him as Pit leapt upon the offending angel and beat him out of the sky. The remaining black-feathered angel, too cowardly to fight alone, turned and fled.

Ban was screaming and writhing with pain. Pit's stomach was twisting with guilt, because Ban had been right. He had been so careless, abandoning his goddess, who he loved so dearly, and allowing her to be kidnapped. What had he been thinking? And now she was in horrible danger, and it was his fault, all his fault. Just to chase Nil. And he had even failed to catch him. Pit's stomach turned again. Thinking about Nil made him feel sick.

Fey flew through one of the arched windows and set Ban down at the base of a pillar. This was the same arcade in which Palutena had cursed Medusa, the same arcade where Pit had left his goddess alone with only the cold intentions of their enemies. There was no sign of the earlier struggle. Fey's hands were trembling. She knelt to try and stop Ban's bleeding with a piece of torn cloth, but he shoved her away. "Leave me!" His voice cracked, "Go to Palutena, and don't you dare wait another minute!"


	4. Stony Silence and the Cold of Evil

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Kid Icarus, Nintendo does. I'm just a huge nerd about it, that's all.

**Author's Note:** So these chapters are a lot smaller than the other ones. Eh. To compensate, I gave you two at once. I know that when you add them together, it's STILL smaller than one of the other ones, but again, eh. At least they are, as my brother would say, "actionative."

TyrantKitty, thank you for your review! I'm always glad to hear when someone likes the story.

And on that note, here's the story:

* * *

Fey seemed very reluctant to leave Ban, but since Pit didn't know where Medusa had taken Palutena, she would have to lead him there. Pit hoped that Ban would be alright, although he knew that the only real way that would happen was if they managed to thwart Medusa immediately and smother the revolution before it got to take hold. The thought filled him with determination.

Copper-feathered Fey flew as if the sky itself was parting before her. Pit could hardly keep up with her, let alone ask where they were headed. She flew low, fast, and far away from the palace. The wind was fierce, and brutally cold, especially for an August evening. Pit's hands and feet grew numb, and the battery forced him to all but shut his eyes. By the time he had figured out that Fey was flying to the Gates, they were practically there.

He had never been here before. There was never any need. The Gates were a place where mere mortals could, supposedly, walk into heaven, although Pit had never heard of such a thing actually happening. This was the highest of Greece's round and meager mountains, and its peak held the stately and physical proofs from centuries of mortal masterminds; great temples built in the name of beloved gods and goddesses. Palutena came here often to hear prayers and accept offerings. Mere angels did not receive such pleadings, being powerless without the aid of their divine leaders. It was certainly not forbidden for them to come to the Gates, although it was unusual.

They alighted silently on the dark ground outside the main temple. The earth was cold beneath their feet, and the wind howled through gnarled and half-dead branches of ancient olive trees. Pit felt his feathers beginning to stand on end. The silence was unnerving, but Fey did not seem very confident either, and he realized that he would have to support her and take the first steps.

Quickly she caught up and kept pace beside him. "Which temple?" he asked, and she nodded to one of the larger ones which was apparently Palutena's, and second in size only to Zeus's.

It was eerily quiet. Pit had expected to arrive amidst the flurry of battle, and see centurions diving at minor demons and monsters on the lawn and in the surrounding air. Perhaps Chly had already managed to fend off Medusa and rescue the goddess? Pit felt his pulse pick up. The lack of action did not seem that promising.

The temple's interior was dusky and occult. It smelled of mold and stale water. And it was as silent as a catacomb. The cold was prickling again at the bare skin of his arms and legs, and Pit began to shiver. "Are you sure?" he asked Fey, turning to see her breaths misting in small white clouds. As a response she only glared at him and curtly nodded.

Pit took his steps carefully about the perimeter of the temple. He had his hands stretched out in front of him to feel his way through the darkness. Ahead, in the sparse light, he could make out the silhouette of a figure; a statue. That was not unexpected. He knew that mortals ornamented their temples with sculptures. What _was_ unexpected, however, was that this particular statue was so _short_. The statues of temples were always great, towering, and larger than life, and always in the image of the god or goddess the temple honored. And they were normally placed in naves, too, usually at the back of the temple. This one seemed to be in the middle of the floor. It was expertly chiseled, though, he had to give the artist that; even if it was in a strange pose, it was anatomically perfect, from every graceful curve of muscle to each individually chiseled hair. Fascinated, he came up to it and in the bad light squinted straight into the face until he could tell the identity. And then his blood ran cold.

It was a centurion.

He backed away sharply and slowly looked around. They were everywhere, scattered all over the temple floor. Stone centurions. Some were standing, some were crouching, some seemed to be frozen in mid-fall, but all were rigid, cold, lifeless, and bearing expressions of raw fear.

"Fey!" he cried hoarsely, and not long afterwards he felt her trembling hands clasp his shoulders from behind.

She stammered. "Are-are all of them…?"

"Pal, Fey! We need to find Palutena, and now!"

Pit and Fey rushed through one of the side arcades, searching twice as fast but still not making much more headway than before because now they didn't dare part from one another. A faint light touched the floor outside one of the alcoves, and Pit felt Fey gripping his shoulder more fiercely. He folded his wings tight against his body and crept forward through swampy light, straining his ears against the staggering quiet. Faintly there was the sound of low, indiscernible mutterings.

Fey nodded to him again, silently stepped back and nocked her bow. Pit did the same. They came forward at the same pace. Just as they were about to cross the threshold, Pit stepped on a loose tile. There was a single, slight note; one chirp as the ceramic tile struck the edge of the one next to it. The muttering ceased immediately.

He realized at that moment that any advantage they might possibly have held was lost. Pit was immediately seized with blind panic, and rage, and that might have been what ultimately saved him, because when the black-feathered guard leapt out to attack, Pit did the very last thing he expected and dive-tackled him.

They tumbled off into the center of the temple, and slid into the backs of one of the stone centurions. Pit hit the angel in the stomach and pinned him to the ground. Hands clenched on his collarbone, he glared into the angel's face, and realized, with a surge of triumph, that the angel's features were marred by black gashes. He had Medusa's pet again.

"_Where is my goddess_?" he cried. To his intense annoyance, the pet only laughed. Pit struck him across the cheek and he quieted immediately, but not without a brief huff of shock. "Where is she? Have you hurt her?"

"We haven't touched her," the pet slurred, and Pit felt an enormous relief in his gut. "_That_, however, will soon be remedied, I believe…"

"I didn't ask you what you believed," Pit snapped, and the angel only smirked at him. He considered hitting him again, but decided against it. "Where is my goddess?"

The pet's eyes lolled about lazily for a few moments, and then he flicked them over to the dully-lit arcade from which he'd leapt.

"In there?" Pit said sharply.

Fey's feathers bristled and she pulled her bow string tauter. "I'll check it out," she said.

Pit watched patiently as Fey carefully crept into the alcove, until the gleaming copper feathers disappeared from view. He thought, _It's all over now._ All the stumblings made over the course of this fiasco were irrelevant now; everything would be alright. He wondered vaguelly why black-gashes wasn't angrier that he'd so easily fumbled his own cause.

Pit looked back down at him and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. His face was marked with crooked delight. He spoke, in a slight and wicked demonesque whisper, "My, my, but you all _are_ very obvious…"

"_Fey_!" Pit shouted, dropping the black-feathered angel and scampering to his feet. "Stop! Fey! It's a trap!"

But by the time he reached her, her shoulders were already turning cold and hard. She was becoming stone quickly, but not so quickly that she couldn't still complete a few stiff and subtle movements. She had scrunched her eyes shut and twisted her head slightly in Pit's direction. In a voice that was hoarse and dry, she whispered, "Don't look—"

And then she was gone.

Pit stifled tears and slowly ran a fingertip along her stony jaw line, and then down the blade of one wing, cold and hard and grey where it had once been warm and alive and bright auburn. Chly had probably met the same fate. He was filled with despair and grief and staggering guilt. Everything was falling apart after all.

He could feel the heat in his cheeks especially sharply where he had laid against Fey's icy shoulder. Slowly, he became aware that there was another source of cold behind him. This, however, was not a natural cold like the surface of stone; this was something that was cold because the warmth was too afraid to touch it. Pit shivered. His wings ruffled and stiffened against his will.

Suddenly he thrashed them, hoping to catch Medusa off guard and leap away to safety, but he failed. A froggy hand snatched his ankle and lifted him roughly off the ground. Pain and fear throbbed in every one of his joints. Medusa was cackling at him, a wretched, gurgling, horrible cackle. "Come on now, _captain_, why don't you show me those pretty blue eyes of yours?" But Fey had used her dying words to give Pit a warning, and he would be damned before he squandered such a precious gift. He kept his eyes pinched tight.

Not far away at all, he could hear the black-feathered angel laughing outright. Something hard clouted him brutally in the side of the head. For a moment, his waking threatened dangerously to leave him. "Not so tough now, are you, kid?" A thin stream of blood trickled out of his mouth and down into his eyes.

"Leave him to me," Medusa said coldly, and Pit's stomach churned as she whipped him around and lifted him out of her pet's reach. "I've got something better for you to do, anyway. Take my sister back to the Palace. We'll deal with the goddess there, in front of whatever simpering support she still has there."

The goddess. _The goddess_. Palutena was _here_. So the pet hadn't been lying, at least about that. His heart was pounding in his chest. Medusa's grip cut into his flesh, but he forced himself to be limp.

He heard the pet laughing more heartily. "Ha!" he barked, "Of course! You kill her then with the greatest attack you can muster! Show them just how strong you really are!"

"Be quiet!" Medusa hissed. "After what she did to me? I'm not about to kill her quickly!" She seemed to simply simmer for a moment, but then her grip on Pit's ankle lessened slightly, and she said with some consideration, "Although humiliating her in front of her angels is a nice idea."

When her pet responded, he sounded further away. He shouted, and his voice echoed slightly. "So kill her with a flick of the wrist? Like she never had any powers at all?"

Medusa roared in anger, and her hand was so tight around Pit's ankle that he thought she was going to squeeze his foot off. "_I told you_," she snarled, "I'm not killing her quickly! She made me a monster, and I'm going to watch her suffer!"

"My goddess," the pet responded humbly, and Pit imagined him bowing. "I'm sure that you will come up with a just and satisfying punishment."

Medusa was silent.

"But," the pet added again, in an undertone. Pit could tell Medusa was interested; she had stooped forward, and the grip on his ankle was the loosest it had ever been. His pulse began to pound again as he psyched himself up… "If I could make one final suggestion, my goddess?"

"I'll allow it," Medusa said in a tone of hardly stifled anger.

"Force her to watch," said the pet, "And kill her favorite angel."

Pit roared and kicked himself off of Medusa's chest. She hissed in fury and surprise, but he felt his ankle fumble and slip out of her hands. He hit the ground and looked up at last at Medusa's pet, staring at him rigid and wide-eyed with astonishment. And thrown over his shoulders was the bound and shackled body of Palutena.

"_Palutena_!" he cried and leapt at the black-feathered angel, but he had come to his senses just in time and turned to flee towards the mouth of the temple. Pit charged after him. All the while he had a prickling sensation that Medusa was running just behind him…

He was right on the pet's tail. He could see the sweat on Palutena's brow, but she looked unconscious slung across the angel's shoulders.

They pounded out the temple's entrance. Both Pit and the black-feathered angel took to the skies at nearly the same time. Pit's mind was so fevered with desperation that he didn't at first understand why he was having trouble seeing and flying. But as cold water drenched him to the skin he realized in a dull and distant way that it was sleeting. The hot August sun had long drowned in this sea of freezing grey.

Pit didn't think. He only flew. What little he could see of the world passed by in a peripheral blur. The pet flew erratically, banking back and forth, zig zagging, up and down, corkscrews, loops, anything to try and shake his pursuer. Pit didn't see any of it. He only watched his goddess, and followed behind in a straight, dead-set path. And when the pet had tired enough and thought to look behind him, he saw that Pit was even closer than before.

The pet banked out of the sky, coming within inches of a frozen overworld mountaintop. He flew deep and fast, into the forests, around rocks and crags, and so deadly accurate that the leaves were barely ruffed where he passed. Now he was trying to lose Pit in the landscape. But this was something Pit was well practiced in; he had spent all his nights of late patrolling the overworld for demons, and now picking a dark shape out in broad daylight was refreshingly easy.

The angel must have known he couldn't outrun him forever. Medusa's pet leapt into a fast weave through a dense grove of trees and Pit followed. The clearing came up very fast. And at the edge of it, the pet had about-faced and braced himself, grinning, hands outstretched. Pit's eyes flew wide; he tilted his wings back to try and slow down and pull up, but the chase had been too close and he hit the pet anyway. The angel grabbed him roughly by the front of the tunic and threw him into the river.

He was waterlogged. It was a disaster. He righted himself immediately and saw the pet kick off from the earth and shoot away towards the palace. Pit wrung as much water as he could out of his tunic, shook his wings once, and he knew even then that that wasn't enough, but the angel was getting away.

At first it didn't seem to matter. The sleet had already drenched him beforehand so the extra weight didn't make him much slower. But the river had thrown water on a place the sleet couldn't reach—Pit's downy underfeathers. He managed to catch up to the angel again, one thousand feet up, and the air was freezing cold. Literally freezing cold.

Each beat of his wings became a little slower, with every passing moment they felt a little stiffer. He was falling behind. Then he was simply falling.

Ice! His wings were coated in ice. He reached around and beat on one with a fist, but it didn't simply fall away. Water hadn't simply fallen on the tops of his wings but had clung to every fiber of every feather, and now ice was where the water had been. He punched them harder, and fingers of pain-fringed numbness stretched across them. He was falling fast now. He clapped his wings together, tried to flex them apart to rip the ice loose. The sound of air rushing past his ears was deafening. He reached back and scraped desperately with his fingernails, knocking loose a flurry of hardened feathers. The ground was coming fast.

The very last thing he remembered was closing his eyes and waiting for the impact.

Then everything went black.


	5. Realization

**Disclaimer: **Kid Icarus. Also, Nintendo owns it and not me.

**Author's Note:** Short chapter is short. And mean chapter is mean. I always wanted to try streaming consciousness, and this seemed like a good place for it. If you don't like this style, don't worry, because I'm not planning to use it again in this story. And short chapter is short.

Be brave, Pit, your long mission is just beginning...

* * *

_Cold, horrible cold. And deafening screaming. But that hadn't been screaming, had it? No, just the wind. But so loud. Why was the wind so angry that it had to scream so loud? _

_Then it was all over, anyway. At least for a few moments. The fall had knocked him unconscious, but it hadn't killed him, of course. There was a reason that the humans were called mortals and the angels were, well, not. What was that reason again? He couldn't seem to put his finger on it, but there had to be something. Why bother making the distinction if there was no difference at all? _

_Things were foggy after that. Things were foggy right now, actually_.

...

His wings were sore.

...

_He had walked here. No, he hadn't. If he was half-conscious now, he would have been half-conscious then. Or would he have been? He had to have gotten here somehow. Unless this was where he had fallen. But this couldn't be where he had fallen. It was too…dark? Maybe it was just night by now. That wasn't it. It was too…warm?_

_..._

His wings were aching terribly.

...

_This was somewhere different, it had to be. There was something on his wrist. He tried to lift it but couldn't. He wondered if he was hurt._

_..._

His wings were hurt, that was for sure.

...

_But his wings weren't attached to his wrists, although his wrists did seem to be attached to…the floor? How did that happen? Ah, a shackle. So that's what was on him. Someone was restraining him. Was he a prisoner? _

_Water was dripping close by. Slowly, over and over, and over, and over… What was it about water? He'd fallen in some water, but that wasn't what he wanted to be thinking about. He closed his eyes and thought hard, as hard as he could. He had a panging headache. But he thought he remembered. _

_Someone had been _talking_ to water. That couldn't be right! What on earth would someone want to tell water? Oh, no, no…they hadn't been talking _to_ the water. They had been scrying, talking to someone else _through_ the water._

_..._

God, his wings, his _wings_. What on earth was that horrible pain in his wings? His pulse was pounding fiercely in them, but only halfway down.

...

_Talking to water, talking through water. Did it make a difference? Oh, it did. What had been said? What had they said? Oh, why did his head have to ache?_

_..._

But why did his wings have to ache worse? The searing, snarling, burning pain finally persuaded him to reach back and try to feel for what was wrong. But for some reason he just didn't seem able to reach them.

...

_Wait…that's what they'd said, of course. The angel who was talking to the water, he'd begun. Leaned over a basin, grinning all over, he'd said, "We found him." _

"_Wonderful. That's the best thing you've told me." And the water talked back. No, not the water, the person on the other side. But that voice sounded so familiar. Who was talking? _

"_And we've caged him down, just like you asked. That kid's no trouble at all knocked out, the little brat." _

"_Is he hurt?" _

"_No." _

"_Then how did you manage to catch him?" _

_The angel had straightened up proudly. "I froze his feathers! He fell out of the sky." _

_The other side of the water was quiet for a moment. "I don't want him getting away from us ever again." _

"_I can assure you, my goddess, I'm more than capable—"_

"_I'm not interested in your accolades! I want certainty!" _

"_That's a rather tall order, my goddess." _

"_You'll fill it!" the water boomed, "I want you to personally make sure that angel never flies out of our grasp again!" _

_The black-feathered angel seemed stupefied for a moment. "My goddess," he sputtered, "Are you actually suggesting—"_

"_Make sure he NEVER FLIES AWAY AGAIN!"_

_..._

Pit wrenched his eyes open. He forced himself to reach all the way back and grab the base of his wing. That's all that was there.

The rest had been cut off.


	6. And so the long mission begins

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Kid Icarus. Seriously.

**Author's Note:** I think this is the fastest I've ever gotten a chapter up, so huzzah for that, anyway. Having a laptop means I don't have to write on the fourteen-year-old Packard Bell that lives in my basement anymore. That thing blue-screen-of-death'd because there wasn't enough room on my floppy disk to save the last chapter. Also, apparently MS Word 97 is mystified by words like "lightbulb" and "placemat" and "Bhuddism" but has no problems whatsoever with "Yuki" and "Miyamoto". I hate that computer.

So anyway, about the story. I realized that this chapter had a huge potential for _angstiness_, so I tried to keep that to a minimum without making it stupidly obvious. The lack of dialogue makes me cringe in the second half, and I'll be really glad when we're out of the stupid underworld. Although despite all that, this is probably my favorite chapter so far. Woo hoo for drama!

* * *

Pit couldn't think. He couldn't move. He couldn't breathe. His entire body was consumed by shock. He lay on the warm stone floor and tried to forget what he'd just seen.

It was impossible, though. His mind would not allow him to return to the gentle thought that his wings were simply sore and that was it. No matter how long he lay there with his eyes scrunched tight, trying to convince himself, the belief wouldn't come. Other subtle differences screamed at him; the soft warmth where they usually fell on his back was gone, he couldn't see them out of the corners of his eyes, he was numb to the subtle shifts of the air that the sensitive feathers could always pick up.

His mind kept wandering back through the memories he had of his flights. They felt so vague. Why had he paid so little attention then when now a single flap would feel like a miracle? He closed his eyes and remembered rocketing through the sky on pure speed and power, and now all that was gone from him forever. It had been stolen, and he hadn't even had the chance to defend it. The only souvenir that was left to him were two foot-long stumps on his shoulder blades, hardened in a caking of his own dried blood and broken feathers. His first full, concrete thought after the realization was _I'm hardly an angel at all anymore_.

He didn't keep track of how long he laid there. He didn't care. He couldn't feel time passing anymore. He couldn't feel much of anything.

Eventually a long beam of gold light fell into his dungeon. Pit watched it creeping out from a single point several yards away, twisting and convulsing as it passed over bumps and other imperfections along the stone floor. Finally it stretched up right next to his face, leaping over his shackled arm. Two figures stepped inside.

They walked towards him slowly. They didn't call out to him. Maybe they were here to help him. Maybe they were here to hurt him more. Either way he didn't care.

One of them stopped a long way off. It was an angel; Pit could tell from the wings. The other figure kept walking towards him, eventually coming close enough that Pit could recognize it as a gnarled and gangly demon. It carried a long, blunt rod in one hand.

The demon reached out its free hand thickly and lifted Pit by his scalp. It hurt like hell and he didn't care. It scrutinized Pit's vacant eyes. "He's startin' to come to," the demon said, turning and growling at the angel who had stayed back. The demon tapped its blunt stick against the ground expectantly. "You want me to knock 'im out again, Narce?"

"No," the angel said, the silhouette of his head turning. Pit recognized his voice immediately; it was Medusa's pet. "Leave him alone, don't hurt him anymore. He's not going anywhere."

The demon looked extremely disappointed, but he did as Narce said and let Pit fall hard back on the ground. The heavy chain that was attached to his arm rattled deafeningly. "That kid ain't gonna live another _day_, let alone til Medusa wants 'im," Pit heard the demon talking as he walked away. "I seen this in mortals b'fore. There ain't no fight left in 'em, they just lay there and die. And sure, you could kill 'em b'fore that, if you wanted, but at that point it's almost like doin 'em a favor. There ain't no point in it anymore."

Narce might have said something after that, but Pit didn't listen for it. He hadn't been consciously thinking that way before, but now he realized that lying there and dying was exactly what he was going to do. Maybe before he could have saved Palutena, but not now. His wings were gone, he was shackled, and he had no weapon. The three other captains were either dead or incapacitated. The sacred realm was in chaos. She was going to die and there was nothing he could do about it. And if Palutena was about to die, then he might as well die himself.

He watched the long beam of golden light wither away as Narce and the demon left him. Then everything was dark and quiet again, save for the dripping of water. The dungeon was sweltering. Pit's mouth was dry, and he toyed distantly with the idea of checking if any of the water was within his reach. It would probably only make him live longer, he realized, but he found himself struggling to his feet anyway, probably simply out of boredom.

The chain was extremely heavy. Pit was feeling much weaker than he had before. It was probably from blood loss. He didn't think about that very much. Instead he focused on dragging himself and the chain towards the sound of the dropping water.

He thought it was another trick from loss of blood at first, a hallucination, when he saw that the water was glowing. His mind sharpened immediately; he couldn't say why, but reaching that water suddenly seemed like the most important thing in the world. A dull ache throbbed in his left arm from pulling that chain, and the whole way there his chest pounded with the worry that his lead would be too short and he wouldn't be able to reach the glowing water.

But he did reach it, and he leaned over, and his eyes fell on the smiling face of his goddess.

Her expression was one of the most profound relief and gratitude. "Oh Pit, oh my dear, I'm so glad to see you…"

Pit fell to his trembling knees. "Pal," he breathed.

"Oh my dear, I was so afraid you'd given up. I'm so glad you haven't, so glad…"

"Pal, where are you?" The old pulse of fury was starting to beat in him again. "I'll come and get you, Pal! Wherever you are! I'll save you! I will!" The impossibility of his situation had been completely forgotten. Pit had looked upon the face of his goddess and understood that even if she was doomed to die, as long as she still lived he could never give up, never. The very idea that moments ago he had been ready to resign himself to a slow death was all but unfathomable.

"Pit, darling, you look terrible. Are you alright?"

"I'm fine, Pal, don't you worry about me. You tell me where you are, I'll be there, I'll be there…"

Palutena smiled at him sadly. "The sky palace, my dear. I'm afraid Medusa is holding me captive."

_Small world,_ Pit thought. On the inside he wondered desperately how he would ever manage such a miracle, but he said, "I'll be there."

"I know that you're a prisoner too," Palutena said softly.

Pit supposed he shouldn't have been surprised that she knew that. Even still, he was speechless. He certainly couldn't look in his goddess's face now and tell her that what he'd promised was impossible.

"That's why I've scried you," she added, and Pit looked up. "I have just enough power left to break your shackles and send you a weapon."

For a moment, relief flooded him, but then another thought occurred and he said, "Pal, why don't you use your remaining power to free yourself?"

"Ah, no," she said, shaking her head, "Even if I managed to free myself, Medusa is still here, and I would be left with no power to fight her. She would simply imprison me again. If I am to have any hope at all, it must be you, my dear."

Pit watched through the water's surface as Palutena spun her fingers through the air. The tips began to glow. He felt the shackle on his arm become hot, and then before he could get a proper look at it, it broke off of him completely.

Palutena looked exhausted. As she wove her fingers again she said, "Now don't be alarmed dear, but they've taken you to the underworld. It shouldn't be too great of a problem; I know you're a strong, fast flyer, so you just soar straight out of there as quickly as you can."

Something warm was running down his back. Pit glanced behind himself for a moment to see that the scabs on one of his wing-stubs had cracked. A thin stream of blood trickled down.

"Pal," he started. The tears he'd been fighting back finally pooled in his eyes. "I don't think that I can…"

Palutena's image was fading, and the water's glow was slowly lessening. A dark shape was starting to form underneath. "Be brave, Pit," he could barely hear her say, "Your long mission is just beginning."

She was gone, and the water was dark. He squinted at it, hoping to maybe catch one last glimpse of his goddess. Instead he saw the tip of something sticking out of the surface.

Carefully he stretched out his fingertips. It was very solid, and definitely hadn't been there before. He dipped his entire hand into the tepid pool and slowly pulled out a long, slender bow. He turned it over in his hands a few times and then gingerly got to his feet.

"Quick as I can, Pal," he whispered, and then rushed for the door.

* * *

Pit had never been to the underworld before. He didn't imagine there were many angels who had. Hades ruled here, demons lived here, mortals went here when they died; and that was really all he knew. If even half of the whispered stories he had heard over his life were true, however, then he would miss his wings every second that he couldn't fly straight out of the place.

The door was locked, but he picked it without too much trouble using a broken arrow. There were no guards. Perhaps Narce had really taken the diagnosis of his demon friend to heart and truly believed that Pit would have died within the next few hours. Now he found the idea absurdly funny and it took everything he had in him not to laugh.

Walking seemed strangely awkward. While he had still been in the dungeon, he had assumed that the floor was uneven, but now that he was out in the more polished hallway, he was forced to admit that he was the problem. The loss of his wings, he realized, had changed his center of balance. This would take some getting used to.

He crept through the hallway on soft feet. There were many more doors; dungeons, he guessed; and he looked under each one to see if he could spot a familiar face, but of course, they were all dark and quiet. Except for one.

The door was open, just a crack, but inside he could hear shuffling, and the familiar rattle of feathers. Pit fell down on his hands (the motion didn't feel as natural without the weight of his wings pressing down on his back) and he peered inside.

It was Narce, Medusa's pet. Pit knew he shouldn't be surprised but something inside him recoiled all the same. He was bent over a basin of clammy water, washing his hands. Pit stayed motionless and waited for him to finish, because being halfway past the doorway only to have Narce finish and turn around and see him would be a ridiculous way for his mission to fail. But the minutes dragged out, and Narce remained stooped, his hands scrubbing frantically. Pit was getting uneasy. Narce was starting to gasp and flinch. Pit straightened himself to get a better look.

He was scrubbing his hands so hard that they were bleeding.

Blind horror seized Pit and he leapt the full distance of the doorway and ran down the hall. The same monotonous walls of warm, chiseled stone flew past him, punctuated by the occasional dungeon door. And then suddenly—open air!

It wasn't really open air, he realized to his plummeting disappointment. He'd reached the end of the hallway, and it opened up into a massive, spiraling atrium. It looked as if it shot straight up out of the center of the earth. That probably wasn't much of an exaggeration. Pit looked up hungrily at the long expanse of unfettered air and thought about how satisfyingly easy this would have been if Narce hadn't cut off his wings.

He leapt down off of the hallway's threshold and into the great stone basin that was the bottom of the atrium, thinking vaguely that this was probably the lowest point in the entire world. The air was stiflingly hot and thick. Breathing was almost impossible. He didn't need to ponder his situation for very long. The one way out was really obvious. He was going to have to climb.

Slowly he turned and traced his eyes over a series of rough and jutting ledges spiraling up towards the opening above. The air was so thick with dust that he couldn't see them past about thirty feet or so. Those that were visible often looked so brittle that they wouldn't support his weight, or else were covered in black kudzu and spines. He thought he saw something move on one and his head snapped to that spot. He didn't move. He kept waiting for anxiety to make the feathers bristle on the wings he no longer had.

Suddenly it launched itself at him, hissing. Its long, inky black form convulsed and gyrated through the air. He recognized it immediately as one of the slimy, snake-like creatures Kako had wrestled off of somebody on the mezzanine. Pit loosed an arrow. The serpent was dead before it hit the ground.

But it seemed that Pandora had opened her box. Another of the snakes hissed from behind him. Pit turned to shoot it as well, and realized that they were everywhere. Inky black snakes were crawling towards him from all directions, their fangs dragging the ground. He looked around frantically and leapt onto a stone ledge nearby. One snake had managed to wrap itself around his ankle and he kicked it back down into the basin.

For just a moment he paused, and something slammed into the back of his head. His teeth cracked into the stone floor and his vision sparkled. His ears exploded with ringing. Pit moaned rolled to the side. Seconds later, the thing that had just hit him came hurtling back and exploded into white powder where his head had been laying moments before. Something in the heights screeched, and Pit looked up.

Skulls. And they had wings, too. How hard had he hit his head?

Another one dive-bombed him, and in a moment of desperation, Pit wound back and whacked it with his bow. It went rocketing off and broke against the opposite wall. And now the rest were coming.

Nocking arrows as fast as he could, Pit managed to shoot a few down, but he already knew he couldn't get them all. Hallucination or not, those things _hurt_, and he wasn't about to let himself get nailed by another one. He took a running leap towards a far-off platform, spread his wings, and—

Fell like a stone. How could he have been so stupid? His whole body felt as if it had been beaten. The throbbing pain spreading over his body persuaded him to stay down. Cool scales slithering across his wrist persuaded him to stand up.

He had spent all of five minutes in the underworld and already felt like he was drowning. Another rotting skull dove at him, but he leapt out of its way and it obliterated a few snakes instead.

He pulled himself back onto the first ledge and jumped to one within his reach. In mid-air he shot arrows rapid fire, downing skulls on the fly. Squat, frog-like floating demidemons had joined in now. Pit moved constantly, but even then, his assailants missed only by inches.

Each jump was a complete toss-up. He was absolutely terrible at gauging them, since in the past he could always count on his wings as a failsafe and aid. Many times he nearly missed completely and took the ledge straight in the chest. Winded, he would then have to pull himself over by his knuckles and pray he wasn't pelted with a flying monster.

The path forked. Pit landed gracelessly in a patch of kudzu and righted himself in a flurry, trying all at the same time to pick the stickers out of his flesh, fight off monsters, and find the next ledge that he could safely jump to.

When he found it, his heart sank. It was so much narrower than the others. Even if he was coordinated enough to reach it, the idea of trying to balance himself on it filled him with dread. Something else suddenly caught his eye, however; and after swatting away a frog-demon, he got a better look.

This was the broadest platform he'd seen yet. He thought distantly about being an open target, but then his heart floundered with relief.

_There was a door by this platform_.

After that, there really wasn't much to think about. Pit felt himself collide with the big platform before he'd even realized he'd jumped. He got to his feet immediately, shot down one last damn skull, threw himself inside and slammed the door.

He slumped down against the door, panting. Wherever he was, it was black as pitch, but he didn't know that yet because he had his eyes closed. The nubs where his wings were cut howled; the toad-demons had kept trying to nibble at them. They would probably get infected now. He hoped not, but there wasn't anything he could do, so he didn't think about it. He felt feverish. Skyworld was cool, but the underworld, which at first he thought was pleasantly warm, he now realized was swelteringly, unbearably hot. He had never felt physically sick before. It was extremely rare for angels to get sick, and he was scared. He was fighting as hard as he could, and he was getting swallowed alive. If it was this hard all the way to the top, he would never make it.

Pit only allowed himself to recover until he felt well enough to stand. He was in another hallway of carved stone. Outside, he could still hear the muffled cacophony of squeals and screeches through the door. It made him a tad reluctant to step back out there. He walked forward slowly, wondering if this room maybe held something he could use as a tool. Or maybe it was a passageway that could safely lead him past the greater part of the underworld. Pit's toe caught a loose rock as he was walking and it tumbled loudly across the floor. Above him, he heard as hundreds of wings uneasily shifted.

The room was filled with bats.

All of them descended at once in one great, screaming, leathery mass. Bats pelted him from every angle. His skin was getting shredded by their claws and teeth. At first Pit tried to fight them back, but it was becoming obvious that that was hopeless. He scrambled backwards blindly, hands outstretched and hoping desperately that he'd be able to find the door again; and hey, for once he was lucky and that was no problem. A few bats had managed to squeeze out through the door with him, but they all flew off immediately and hid themselves away. Pit was still so strung out from that encounter that he immediately leapt onto the next nearest platform without even noticing that all the skulls and frog-demons had strangely disappeared…

He didn't realize that until, bolting down a long ledge, he saw the tail of a black cloak disappear around a far-off corner. Pit halted immediately, and it was then that the silence occurred to him. Uneasiness stirred in his belly. If he had just seen what he thought he'd seen, he would rather go back and deal with the silly little skulls and frog-demons.

There was no other way around it, though. He was going to have to go forward. The few feathers he had left stood on end at the idea.

_So,_ he thought, forcing his feet to shuffle, _What do I know about this guy?_ The truth was, he didn't know much. Among immortals like the angels, the figure was regarded in sort of a distant, mythological way. Most of the stories about him were made up to try and frighten the younger ones. Some thought he was one of Hades' angels, and that he'd just gotten stuck with a rather bizarre and nasty job. Tally had liked to talk about him, actually. She hadn't thought he was an angel or even a demon, but something completely different and maybe otherworldy. Pit had agreed with her then, but now the thought struck him as far from reassuring. He wondered suddenly if Tally was okay. That's when the smell hit him.

A mortal could have identified the smell immediately, but to Pit it was merely repugnant. Since he did not live among mortal creatures, he did not know what Death smelled like when he finally came to claim them. He had reached the corner where he had first seen the black cloak disappear, and he shrank back into the wall as the smell grew stronger and he began to hear muttering. Just when Pit thought the smell would cause him to gag, he saw him.

Death stepped out onto Pit's ledge. They were feet apart. Pit thanked every god and goddess he'd ever heard of that his back was towards him. Bony, rotted fingers wrapped around a massive scythe, Death leaned forward and peered down into the depths of the underworld. And then, just as soon as he'd come, Death pivoted around and disappeared back into his alley.

Pit was in shock, but the thought of waiting here for Death to walk back out again was more unbearable than the risk of leaping across his path, so that was what he did. He strained to hear the wheezing or muttering, but it did not come. The horrible smell had faded. Death had overlooked him.

His momentary elation was marred by an earsplitting screech. The skulls were back.

Pit was exhausted. If Death hadn't been close enough to hear him, he probably would have screeched back at the skulls in sheer frustration. Instead, he looked frantically around, and found another door. It would probably be just another room full of more psychotic bats. He didn't care. Pit threw himself inside before the skulls decided to start bombing him again.

It was another room, but, tentatively, Pit decided it looked bat-free. It was much better lit than the bat-room, anyway. There was a pool of water in the center, and (Pit felt his pulse pick up) it looked like it was glowing. He ran towards it, and in his clumsy excitement, didn't stop until his feet were wet.

It wasn't Palutena, though. Pit's scrier looked annoyed, and eyed the ripples in the pool as they passed over his face with pursed lips. "We-ell, little angel boy!" He clicked his tongue. "Isn't this a sticky mess you've gotten yourself into?"

It was Zeus.


	7. Sacred or Invincible

**Disclaimer:** Kid Icarus isn't mine, boy. Plagiarism is for heretics and eggplants. Of which I am neither.

**Author's Note:** Oh goodness! Between all the work I've had for school (read, "General Chemistry"), and between playing the NEW OLD POKEMON GAME WHOOP WHOOP (sorry bout that), it seems that it's taken me considerably longer to come up with this next chapter. No matter how long this takes, rest assured that I _will get this story done some day_, I can promise you that. I would be far too disappointed in myself to put this kind of effort into writing this much of it only to never get to the end. No. Definitely gonna finish this. Never gonna give you up.

I thought that the story was beginning to take on a sort of dark and despairing kind of tone, which is bad, because, I mean, it's a freaking Nintendo game. So in an effort to remedy this little predicament, Zeus joins the story this chapter, to (hopefully) provide a little comic relief. And oh goodness, the plot thickens at the end! Oh goodness indeed.

Now's as good a time as any to thank Nira Rose and Icestar for their reviews. It's always great hearing when somebody likes your story, and I'm definitely grateful!

**EDIT:** Icestar: Thanks for that! And I would be flattered if you put a link to this story on your site.

If you would like, feel free to post a link to your site as a review as well. I'd like to visit!

So anyway.

* * *

Pit made a noise like a rooster having one of his tail feathers yanked out.

"It's good to see you, too," Zeus said sarcastically, scrunching his nose and backing back a bit. "Boy, I know it can be unsettling to look into the face of celebrity, but _surely_ we can remember our manners, hm?"

"Zeus!" Pit sputtered, "Oh, thank goodness! _Please_! You _must_ help me!"

But Zeus was clicking his tongue and waggling his finger. "Now, now, little angel boy," he said patronizingly, "you aren't going to ask me to tell you to remember who your superiors are as well, are you? I'm a god among _gods_, boy, and if there's anything in the whole stinking world that I "must" do, it's because _I've_ decided that I "must" do it!"

Pit was a little dumbstruck, and he sat down on the edge of the pool. After a while, he asked, "You _do_ know what's happened down here, though, right?"

"Well of course!" Zeus said heartily, "I know everything! Being God has perks, huh?"

"So you know about Medusa taking over the sky palace? You know about her holding Palutena prisoner? You know about the war going on?"

"What'd I just say?" Zeus snapped his fingers. "_Everything_."

Pit sat dumbstruck for a little while longer, but Zeus was apparently waiting for him to make the next comment, so he asked, "So what are you going to do about it?"

Zeus was aghast. "What am _I _going to do about it!?" Theatrically, he pressed his fingers into his collarbone. "_I_? Haven't you been listening to a thing I've said, boy? _I'm_ not doing _anything_ about it. This isn't _my_ problem. And I don't particularly feel like _making_ it _my_ problem. I've got quite enough problems without everybody else giving me _their_ problems, too."

"You've got problems, huh? Like _what_?" Pit challenged.

"Like _you_!" Zeus jabbed a finger accusatorially, and Pit flinched, but of course it was only an image on water and Zeus's hand never actually reached him. "Hades is gonna give me shit if he figures out there's an angel in the underworld! What are you even doing down there, anyway? Don't you know the rules, boy?"

Pit had never actually met Zeus before now, but he had always still imagined, indistinctly, that he wasn't quite as much of a dipshit as Ban always insisted he was. Reality can be disappointing.

"First of all, my name is _Pit_, and I'm a Captain, not a child, so you can quit calling me 'boy'. And I didn't come to the underworld on purpose; Medusa had me sent here. And I'm trying to get out, believe me, but _unfortunately_ they've also made that a little complicated." Zeus was only half-listening, Pit could tell. Before he could say anything, though, Pit turned around to show him the bloody nubs where his wings had been.

He looked over his shoulder and saw Zeus squinting. Eventually he snorted, and said, "You take me for a fool, boy? They'd _never_ make anybody with wings as scrawny as yours a _Captain_."

Pit thrashed the surface of the water with his bow, hitting the image of Zeus square between the eyes. The waves obliterated him. Pit stormed away and sat with his forehead on his knees. Maybe he had been stupid to hope that the solution would be this easy.

After a while, he heard chuckling. Zeus had re-scried him. "Touchy, touchy!" The god snorted. "And here I was all ready to help you out."

Pit's head snapped up at that comment and he scrambled back over to the edge of the pool. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" He pleaded, "you're still gonna help me, aren't you?"

Zeus hummed and tilted his head from side to side as he considered that. "I suppose I'd better," he said finally, and Pit's heart did backflips in his chest.

"Thank you, _thank you_!" Pit cried, but Zeus just sort of smiled crookedly and brushed at the air a few times, dismissively.

"Hmm, yes, well, being God does have its responsibilities too, you can be sure," he said, and then the two of them just sat and stared at each other for awhile.

"What do you want me to do?" said Zeus.

Pit might have been impatient with him if he still hadn't been so relieved. "Ah, well, you know," he said, "just free Palutena, put the Sky Palace back to normal, get rid of Medusa—"

He stopped there, because Zeus was laughing at him.

"What!?" he said indignantly, feeling his few feathers bristling.

"When I said I'd help _you_," Zeus choked, forcing the words out as best he could, "I meant that I'd help _you_."

Pit took a moment, blinking, to turn over what he'd just said, before he lashed back angrily, "Damn it, Zeus, helping Palutena _would_ be helping me! What do you think I'm trying to do?"

But the old man just shook his head and wiped at his rheumy, leaking eyes with the end of his long beard. "No, no, no," he said, snorting, "I'm not getting involved in _that_, thank you very much. They're my daughters, you know; things could get pretty messy if I step in."

Pit was about to say "But by helping me you _are_ getting involved," but he decided not to, because Zeus might not have helped him at all. He thought about saying, "So much for not making this your problem, huh," but decided against that too, for the same reason. In the end, he just sat on the pool's edge, scowling and trying to understand what had just happened and why.

Zeus grinned and tilted his wily face to the side. "I'm glad you've finally seen things from my perspective!" he said.

Pit thought, _I feel like I've just taken a brick to the head._

Zeus twiddled his thumbs for a little bit, watching a glazed-over Pit with an expression of indulgence. "So I'll ask you again," he said after a while, heartily, "what do you want me to do?"

Pit already knew what he wanted. He was afraid to ask. H swallowed hard and forced himself to look down into the pool and at Zeus's little smirk of superiority. "Can you fix my wings?"

His response came immediately, in two simple, crushing words: "_What_ wings?"

Any pluck he might still have had dissolved in that instant. Pit shoved his face into his crossed forearms and waited for Zeus to leave him. Bright light from the pool continued to nibble at his closed eyelids. The shrieks of the flying skulls and the toad-beasties had left a dull humming in his ears, but over that he could still hear the sound of Zeus drumming his fingers against a block of granite. Zeus was taking a long time to take the hint, even by dipshit standards. Pit sighed.

"Alright! Alright!" Zeus barked. Pit jumped. The god glared at him with a furrowed brow and then tossed his arms to the sky in exasperation. "I can see you have no idea what you want. Whatever! I'll just pick something myself, and you can _deal with it_. And maybe take this as a lesson, boy, that he who fails to make a decision will have that decision made for him!

Zeus dusted his hands brusquely and shoved one sleeve up to his shoulder. Pit watched with a tame curiosity. "You see that statue over there?" Zeus gestured to his right, and Pit looked up and jumped. It was a stone centurion, one like he'd seen in Palutena's temple with Fey. He glanced around himself nervously and wondered if there were any others he had failed to note. Zeus ignored his discomfort.

"He's not _really_ dead, you know." Pit's eyes snapped back to the god immediately.

"Not dead?" he said, dumbfounded. His disbelief seemed to amuse Zeus, but he continued anyway, "He surely can't breathe, and all his blood must be stone! How can he be alive?"

Zeus shrugged, and Pit got the feeling that he was trying to annoy him on purpose. "Dunno. In my experience, it's best not to question miracles, boy. But if your poor heathen mind stumbles into gridlock without some kind of explanation, think of it this way: he's not _really_ stone. He's just cursed. And curses are made to be broken, right boy?"

"I guess so," he said apprehensively. He didn't know much about curses. They were the work of dark spirits and gods.

"Of _course_ they are!" Zeus boomed. "And I'll tell you, this curse is _stupidly_ easy to break too, you'll see." Zeus beckoned him forward, and Pit, not knowing quite what he wanted, took a guess, and reached out and dipped his hand into the water. There was something in Zeus's hands, and he lifted it up and out. To Pit's astonishment, he felt it brush against his fingertips, smooth and wooden. He grabbed it and pulled it out of the water.

"It's a hammer," Pit said. Cold beads ran down his arms and fell back into the pool like a drizzle of spring rain.

"It's a _sacred_ hammer," Zeus corrected him, matter-of-factly. He nodded at the centurion. "Why don't you go bonk that fellow on the head with it, hm?"

"You wanna talk about disrespect?" Pit snapped. "Zeus, you might not think very highly of your…underlings…but we do things a little differently in the Sky Palace, and if you thi—"

Before Pit could finish, Zeus rolled his eyes and flicked his wrist. Pit felt the hammer yank itself out of his hands, and watched, a little thunderstruck, as it soared across the room and smacked the centurion between his gray and lifeless eyes.

Nothing much happened, at first. A few little cracks were left on the statue's forehead, like drought trenches across parched earth. There was the sound of crumbling, and Pit jumped as a long break suddenly appeared across the centurion's body. And before he had time even to blink, the statue exploded. Stone dust clouded the air, and rubble tinkered against the ground with a sound like bells. Someone was coughing, and Pit squinted into the dust as it began to settle out and saw, to his astonishment, the figure of a stooped young angel, garbed in the telltale brass armor and winged helmet.

"C-captain," the centurion sputtered, nodding at Pit. "Who rescued me?"

Pit knocked his thumb down towards the pool and the image of a grinning Zeus. "Thank Zeus."

The centurion whooped. "Thank Zeus, indeed!" And before Pit or Zeus could say anything else to him, he galloped out of the room and rocketed skyward.

"Hey boy," Zeus said lazily, "just as a protip, you know, for future reference, you might help yourself out a little more if you can talk those fellows into fighting _with_ you instead of just letting them run off on their merry way."

Pit was pawing through the dust and rubble as Zeus spoke. "What happened to that hammer?"

"_Sacred _hammer," Zeus said, sounding agitated, "and anyway, I suspect it broke."

"It _broke_?"

"Yeah. Why not?"

"You keep calling it _sacred_!"

"Well, boy, 'sacred' doesn't mean the same thing as 'invincible,' and the sooner you figure that out, the more I suspect things'll start making sense to you."

"How am I supposed to free the centurions if I don't have a hammer?"

Zeus crossed his arms. "I guess you'll just have to find a new one, won't you?"

Pit was spitting with indignation. "_Find_ one? What do you mean, _find_ one? You're gonna stand there and tell me these things just _fall from the sky_?" He looked ready to complain a bit more, but instead opted to step back and summon enough humility to make a final plea: "Can't you just _give_ me a new hammer?"

"_Give_ you a new hammer?" Zeus snorted, and the visage of his face on the pool surface grew larger as he leaned in closer. "Boy, don't you think I've given you quite enough already?"

"I just…" Pit sat back down on the edge of the pool. He wondered how many other people had looked the god of gods so closely in the eyes. He wondered how many of those had been brave enough (or stupid enough) to challenge Zeus as much as he had. A part of him thought vaguely that to say any more would certainly be pressing his luck, but another part was still feeling too reckless to care. "I just don't understand. This campaign of Medusa's in the skyworld…it's not a good thing! It's a catastrophe! A nightmare! And you could fix it in an instant, a heartbeat, a snap of your fingers! I don't understand. Why on earth won't you?"

Pit had anticipated any of a litany of responses, most of them sarcastic or demeaning or at the very least violent. Zeus only sighed, shook his head, and said gently, "You need to try harder, Pit."

"I'm not gonna lie," Pit said, gesturing to the room and down at the pool of water. "This has probably been the biggest letdown of my life."

Zeus said, "You're welcome."

With that, the image on the water faded and the room grew dark. Pit didn't feel significantly better, although he was a good deal angrier. He spent a few minutes trying to concentrate on the good news, which was that Medusa's curse was reversible. The implications of that were staggering. Perhaps he could heal enough centurions to form a militia. The task of re-capturing the Sky Palace wouldn't be impossible if he had a force to rival Medusa's armada of black-feathered angels.

Fey and Chly were still alive.

Maybe Zeus's help hadn't been as worthless as he'd thought.

* * *

When Pit stepped outside, his first instinct was to look around for the centurion Zeus had freed, but of course he had already flown away and was probably long gone. A screaming skull dove at Pit's head while he was looking the other way, and he thought, _frankly though, who could blame the guy?_

He felt as though he was doing better. The senseless panic he had first felt was fading, and his good instincts were kicking in again. The skulls and toads and snakes weren't that scary at all. In fact, they were pretty stupid. He began to notice that they always attacked him in the same way, in the same patterns and formations, and at the same intervals. It got to the point where he could shoot an arrow into empty space, and a few moments later a skull would swoop down and be killed by it because the headstrong things refused to change their flight patterns.

Elation was just starting to balloon in his chest when he looked straight up and was startled enough to say aloud, "You have _got_ to be kidding me!"

From the floor of the underworld's atrium, it looked as if the ceiling opened up directly into the outside air. But the mist had been thick, and it scattered the light like sawdust. After tremendous struggle, Pit had accomplished something that to him had seemed impossible; he had scaled the entire underworld atrium, without his wings, and under a constant barrage of nasty little monsters. But rather than an exit and fresh air, he was greeted instead with a stone wall.

He reached up and pressed one of his hands against the ceiling. The stone was rough and hot, and very bright. It was whiter than anything he had seen in the underworld, save perhaps the light that had come from the pools while Zeus and Palutena scried him.

Carefully he gripped the edge of his perch and leaned out over the precipice. His stomach trembled and climbed into his mouth. The bottom was so far that it was invisible.

If the exit wasn't here, then where was it? Had there been other doors scattered throughout the atrium that he had overlooked? He hadn't fully explored the bat room. Maybe the exit was through there and he would have to go back and brave it.

It was a daunting proposal, and Pit was reluctant to accept it. What a waste to have gotten so far only to have to turn around and go more than half the way back. He sat down cross-legged to weigh his few options.

It was then, when he was completely still, that Pit was able to feel something he hadn't felt since he'd first woken up in the underworld.

A breeze.

An impossibly faint breeze, but a breeze nonetheless. Pit was a creature of the wind, and all angels were lovers of the air and its subtleties. He could feel a stream of air no wider than a few hairs moving one of the feathers he still had on his back.

It was all the invitation he needed. Pit was on his feet in an instant, his head craned back as far as it could go, squinting at the ceiling. There was a small hole, barely big enough for a pencil to slide through. Pit tapped the end of his bow against it and was astonished to see that it left a mark. This wasn't natural stone, it was masonry. And it was still wet.

He jabbed his bow upwards. Concrete crumbled off in chunks. He quickly ducked his head out of the way and watched the pale rubble rain back down towards the atrium's floor.

A great rush of cool air washed over him. Pit shivered. With a little difficulty, he pulled himself up and looked around, huffing little clouds of white fog.

It was cool and dark. There was only a small area on the floor that had been quickly patched with concrete; everything else was dark stone, like the rest of the underworld. But it was obvious that he was no longer in the atrium. This room was very small, and there was only one door.

There was only one door, and at that very moment, it opened.

The feeling of panic hadn't even registered until he'd already leapt to a hiding place. The painful, horrifying, tedious practice of climbing all the way to the top of the underworld had done at least one good thing for Pit: he'd won his grace back. Wings or no, when his palms and soles hit the pavement, it was with the same weightlessness and silence of falling autumn leaves. He crouched behind a broken pillar in the darkness, close to the ground, like a feral cat cornered and ready to fight. His interlopers never saw nor heard him.

Slowly he shifted his weight and glanced around the pillar to try and see who it was. All that was visible were the silhouettes of two figures. Two _winged_ figures. Pit's heart sank.

"He couldn't have gotten far," one of them spoke in a voice that was nervous and simpering. Pit could see him wringing his hands. It was Narce. "He couldn't have! I cut his wings off, for the gods' sake!"

The other angel did not speak. Pit could see the feathers on his black wings shaking.

Narce lashed out at him suddenly, striking him in the head. "Don't you look at me like that!" Narce screamed, his wings beating erratically like an injured bird's. "When Medusa gives you a job, you do it! You just do it! Nevermind the grit or the disgust!" Narce straightened himself and crossed his arms. "Bu, ah, silly me. Even _you _ought to understand _that_ by now, _certainly_." He added that sardonically, but if his intention was to stir the other angel into fighting him, then he failed.

The other angel had gone shock-still. Pit watched Narce trace his gaze all the way out to—

"A _hole_!?" Narce spat. He rushed over and knelt down to the massive cavity in the floor that Pit had just dug, as if hoping it would repair itself when he took a closer look. Narce looked up, and the relatively strong light pouring in from the underworld was enough to illuminate the plain fear written across his marred face.

"He's in here," Narce said in disbelief, getting up and stepping back, "he made it all the way up to the dungeons." He looked behind himself, at the doorway he'd just stepped through to discover this fresh atrocity, and he wrung his hands. "He cannot escape," he said after a moment, firmly. "He _must_ not. Scour this room!" Narce barked suddenly at the other angel, who had merely been watching him and trembling. "Scour this room for him! Now! Help me!"

Up until this point a feeling of slowly mounting horror had been gripping Pit. At Narce's last coarse declaration, his mind exploded. A thousand ideas pounded through him every second, each more desperate than the one before. He couldn't possibly slink back down the way he'd come. He couldn't possibly crawl out the door at the other end of the room. He couldn't possibly scurry to a better hiding place. He couldn't possibly stay where he was. They were going to find him. It was inevitable. The weight of helplessness crushed Pit down into the floor.

Breaths were blowing against the back of his neck. He felt the hairs bristle. He gripped his bow so tightly that he could feel his pulse pounding against it. A final plan had occurred to him—he would try to kill both of the angels. Success was impossible, he knew already. Narce alone had been an even match for him when he had been at full health.

He felt fingers suddenly land on his head. Pit sat up and wound his bow back, but half a second from making the strike, he stopped.

It was Nil.

He only stared at Pit, his black wing tips trembling in the poor light. Pit noticed after a moment that he had left his arm out, still reaching halfway from touching him. Their encounter lasted only a few moments more.

"Is he here? Did you find him?" Narce was screaming from the far corner of the room, loudly shifting rocks and chunks of rubble.

Nil was quiet for a minute. "No," he said softly. He cleared his throat. "No! No. That little bastard's probably halfway through the dungeon by now, Narce."

From the other side of the room, Narce howled. He thundered across the floor and leapt out of the room. Nil quickly drew his hand back and followed after him. He never looked back.

Many long, silent minutes passed, and Pit lay curled between the cold wall and the broken pillar, astonished. Eventually, when his mind had quieted itself, he forced himself to his feet and carefully walked out of the black room's single door.


	8. SORRY TO KEEP YOU WAITING

**Author's Note:** If you checked out this chapter yesterday, you were treated to a long, stupid story about "Meggy" that didn't serve any coherent purpose except to confuse the living daylights out of everyone and help me burn off some steam from the whole "passing out into my laptop from euphoria" thing. Um, anyway, I decided to come back and delete it, just leaving the most important part:

_KID ICARUS. IS GETTING. A SEQUELLLLLLLLLLLLL._

And I'm not talking rumors and speculation either, because believe me, we've had quite enough of _that_ going on in the fandom lately. I'm talking straight up, from the Powers that Be, the Big N themselves. AND IT LOOKS AWESOMEEEEEE. Don't believe me? Go have a lookie at their official e3 site: e3*nintendo*com (except you need to put a "." in the place of every "*" because FFN is all like "NO LINKING FOR U"). I had gone on looking for stuff about Zelda Wii (which looks pretty sexy by the way, I am very much a fan of the new art style), and ended up finding the one game that I had basically decided we were never, ever, EVER going to see.

It's proof that Nintendo still loves us. So lemme return the favor and swiftly remind everyone that I don't own Kid Icarus. You rock, Sakurai. Real hard.

...Um. Anyway.

This chapter took a rather ridiculous and frankly nauseating amount of time to write. I got it done today mostly just because I really wanted to bullshit about _Uprising_, but there were other massive difficulties throughout the middle, like decided how the hell I wanted to handle Pit's interaction with dumb old Mr. Parrot-Beak, as well as his speculations about Nil.

So as far as excuses go, it's pretty base, but I was pretty ripped up about how to handle this chapter. I didn't want to screw up any plot points for the future releases, and yet at the same time wanted to make Pit's motives for his actions realistic.

And on a fun side-note, I really hate that monster. You know, _that_ monster. I had bought Myths 'n Monsters from a yard sale for a nickel (best deal ever!), and as I had played it, I hadn't even realized what _that_ monster was supposed to be. When Pit got hit with the curse, I just thought he was getting sucked up into his own hairdo, or something. It didn't help that the graphics were in four glorious shades of vomit green. Artsy!

Also, _that_ monster is hard to make into something scary. I probably would have been better off just making Pit's encouter with it funny instead of going for hardcore, but, eh. I kind of like how it turned out, despite. Keeps the tone nice.

And I'm sorry about the chapter title. After seeing the _Uprising_ teaser, I really couldn't resist. Thanks also to everyone who reviewed for chapter 7, I really appreciate it! ** Tigerluv**: That was more or less the idea. I was also trying to set everybody up for a little more Narce-insanity in the future. Considering how that scene was so random, it probably just came off more as a moment of WTF than anything. Thanks for the question!

Um, okay. It's really time for me to shut up.

* * *

Narce had called this place _the dungeons_. Pit had assumed that the "dungeons" had been where he had first woken and found himself. But even if this level of the underworld apparently didn't bear any prisoners, it was clear how it had earned its name. The next room Pit stepped into was as small and cold as the first, lit weakly in dusty shades of gray and blue. Besides the one he had come through, there was a second door on the far side of the room.

It seemed straightforward enough. A quick glance around told him that the room was barren. He took a step—

—and felt something cool and scaly drop onto his shoulders. The snake hissed at him lethargically, but Pit, far from feeling that way himself, grabbed it by the tail and flung it across the room. Behind him, he heard the cold plop of more snakes falling to the floor. He shot them immediately and looked about himself, annoyed and disheartened.

Woven reed baskets were hung and dotted across the ceiling. Pit strained his ringing ears and thought he could just make out the sound of disgruntled hissing. He shot an arrow into one without thinking, and twenty black serpents rained down.

Pit balked and shot arrows frantically into the small mob of snakes he'd just unleashed. All of them perished, eventually, but when Pit finally looked up, he realized that as he had fought, twenty _more_ snakes had fallen and were closing in on him. And all of these out of just _one_ reed basket.

They had to be enchanted. No other possibility made sense. All Pit's efforts against them suddenly seemed futile. He could fight snakes for days and the reed baskets might never run dry. Pit leapt backwards and charged towards the far door, dodging streams of snakes as they began to pour from the other baskets.

The next room had a door on every side, even on the floor and ceiling. The nausea of hopelessness he'd first felt while charging up the underworld's atrium was coming back to him as he began to understand what exactly the "dungeons" were.

A gauntlet, a labyrinth. Dear gods, the only way to freedom was itself a gargantuan puzzle.

Which of the five routes should he take? In the end, it came down to a random choice. Or a mostly random choice, anyway. He couldn't have gone with the ceiling route because the ladder was hovering, cruelly, inches out of his reach. He went straight, _to keep things simple_, he told himself.

He walked through the doorway and onto a small balcony. This room stank like burning poison, and one look down told him why.

Twenty feet below, the floor was covered in a bubbling bath of black tar. It hissed rippling lines of clear heat, and Pit felt sweat beading on his brow. On the far edge of the room was the twisted corpse of a very unlucky horse, his bones frozen in a pose of agony. Jutting out from the right wall were three small platforms, and Pit looked directly across and saw another door behind another similar balcony. But he found the situation disarming and stepped back, swallowing hard. Surely one of the other three passages would look easier.

In fact, the tar pit turned out to be about his best bet. The left passage was so thickly armed with barbs and spears that he couldn't possibly have navigated it without filleting himself. The right passage was populated by about fifty floating balls of fire, who, on closer inspections, turned out to be small demons who screeched madly and dove at him when he got too close. One departed a rather nasty and painful burn to his left shoulder. The passage on the floor simply opened up into total darkness. Pit couldn't tell how far down the floor was, and that was under the rather hopeful assumption that the room had a floor at all. He returned to the tar pit and was glad to have it.

Experience had taught him it was best not to think about these things. He quickly leapt across the three platforms, never pausing on one for any longer than what was needed to coordinate his next jump. The best of four options perhaps, but Pit still turned away from the tar room uneager to look back.

The room he found himself in now was, mercifully, very calm. He even checked the ceiling for reed baskets and found that it was bare. There was one door, to his right. Then Pit looked behind himself and nearly jumped out of his skin.

Pit staggered backwards, fumbling to nock an arrow. A seven foot tall demon had been lurking behind him, but before Pit could release his bowstring, the demon put up its hands and hissed. "Put away your weapon! I am not interested in claiming your life."

His hand wavered, but the demon was motionless and eventually Pit relaxed his bowstring. He would not put away his bow, however. "So…what d'you want, then?" Pit asked him suspiciously.

"Business!" The demon kneaded its hands. It was wearing a gray hood, but Pit could see inside two beady yellow eyes. Its face had a beak like a parrot's that clicked when it spoke.

"You're trying to sell me something." Pit shook his head, incredulous. "I don't have any money."

The demon chuckled darkly. "No, no, I wouldn't have wanted your money anyway. What good is an angel's money in the underworld?"

Now Pit was simply confused. "If you never wanted angel money to begin with, why would you come up and offer to sell _me_ something?"

"Because," the demon rasped; its voice was insubstantial and wispy, "this is a war, and in war both sides hunger only the other's blood. And if you've survived this far, you must be strong. You've killed a lot of monsters, haven't you, angel?"

Pit shifted his weight uncomfortably. He wasn't sure where the demon was going with this, but he hadn't liked the crack about hungering blood. "I guess I have," he admitted. "But so what? Were they friends of yours?"

The demon chuckled at him again. "Oh, they certainly weren't, angel, they certainly weren't. But when you kill a monster, you steal its soul."

"Steal its soul?" Pit repeated, flabbergasted. "They _have_ souls?"

"Please, angel," the demon said, still chuckling, "no more of these jokes. Vile, wicked, mean little souls, but they _do_ have souls, nonetheless. And anyway, I want you to trade them to me."

The demon handed Pit a small leather rucksack and he took it from him cautiously. It was clearly empty, but as soon as it was in his hands it grew suddenly very heavy. He looked down inside and saw that it had filled with metal tokens.

Pit held one of the tokens up for the demon to see. "You can't tell me," he said slowly, "that the vile, wicked, mean little monsters _actually_ have souls that are in the shapes of little fuchsia hearts."

A wicked hiss came from the demon, and Pit jumped, but then he realized that had simply been the demon's greatest bray of laughter yet. "I like you, angel," it crooned, wiping at its beady yellow eyes. "You and I should do a lot of business together!"

Pit had been about to ask for more details about the monster souls, but before he could get a word out the demon had pulled out a large box and opened it up on the ground. "Tell me if you see anything you would like."

From what he could tell, it was mostly junk. A good deal of the demon's goods was comprised of old and dusty bottles of nectar and rusted metal gauntlets. There were a few short sticks of charcoal and tattered scraps of parchment inscribed with faint writing that Pit was too impatient to try and read. Eventually he got to the items at the bottom, and couldn't stop himself from balking out loud at what he saw.

"Oh?" the demon said innocently, leaning down over him.

"A hammer!" Pit cried. He stared at it in his palms as if he expected it to at any moment dissolve.

The demon clicked its beak in annoyance. "I've got buckets of those stupid things, angel. You can have it for twen—" it noticed the look of astonishment on Pit's face and quickly said, "Ah, um, I mean, _thirty_ monster hearts."

Pit was already counting his tokens. "So you said you've got a lot more of them? How many?"

The demon seemed surprised. "I, well, I don't know. I've only got five on me right now."

"I want the other four, too!"

"Whatever you'd like, angel," the demon chuckled, retrieving the other hammers from under its cloak and handing them to him. "You _do_ have the hearts for all this, don't you?"

"I don't think it's gonna be a problem," Pit said, raising his eyebrows. He had taken out all one hundred and fifty tokens and not made much of a dent in his collection.

The demon was drumming its fingertips together. "I assume you're trying to get out of here, angel. Out of the underworld, I mean." Pit nodded hesitantly. "It's quite the puzzle, isn't it angel? I'll give you a bit of free advice: you'll never make it."

Pit bristled and growled. "What kind of advice is that? I didn't pay to be insulted!"

From within the depths of the hood came a muffled clucking sound. "You didn't let me finish, angel. What I meant was that you'll never make it—_without_ a map!"

"Do you _have_ a map?"

"What do you think those sheets of parchment were that you seemed so uninterested in?"

Pit quickly piffled back through the chest and came up with a parchment that seemed to be in slightly less godforsaken condition than the others and squinted at it. There wasn't any writing on it after all; it was merely a large grid of squares. And that was it.

"You call this a _map_? It doesn't have any notes on it! How am I supposed to know what anything is?"

"Well, you can't have _everything,_ angel."

"How much do you want for it?"

The demon clicked its fingertips together. "Five hundred."

"Are you _kidding_ me!"

Pit found himself getting hissed at again, but this time it wasn't one of laughter. "If you knew how rare those maps were, you would gladly pay twice as much, angel!"

He counted out the tokens, noting dully that the demon had conveniently charged him the largest whole-hundred amount that he could afford. The demon excitedly scooped up the little pile of tokens and gestured nonchalantly back at the chest. "You can take a charcoal stick too, angel. My gift. Maybe write in your own notes, hm?"

"What about the rucksack?" Pit asked while pawing through the junkets. "Do you want me to pay you for that, too?"

For a moment, the demon seemed sorely tempted, but then it shook its head. "Mm, no, I think I'll just take that back." It yanked it out of Pit's hands before he could react.

Pit was indignant for a moment until he noticed that the rucksack had refilled with tokens while it was in the demon's grip. "Your monster hearts are _yours_, angel. All the rucksack does is let you _see_ them."

"So what do you do with all those things, anyway," Pit asked it, "eat them?"

The demon's beady eyes shifted. "Ah, no. They're a tad salty."

"So what, then?"

"Now that's none of your business, is it angel? I didn't ask you what you were doing with all those stupid hammers!" The demon straightened itself. "Or are you worried about the souls of all those poor little monsters you killed?"

Pit glared at him.

"You know, angel, we're really not that different, you and I."

"I killed the monsters because they attacked me. Demons kill because they love the suffering."

"You can be as self-righteous about it as you want, angel, but either way, we're both killing. I feel sorry for you, angel. It can't be easy to believe yourself good when everything you do contradicts the things you stand for."

Before Pit had a chance to react to that, the demon swept the heavy black cloak around and vanished. He stared at the empty place on the cold stone floor where the demon no longer stood until his eyes grew sore, then shut them and staggered backwards. The nasty things those wretched creatures could say. Pit nearly wished he had listened to his gut and turned and run when he had first seen the demon lurking behind him. Fresh self-doubt was a steep price for five hammers and a map with no symbols.

His mind was ablaze. Unconsciously he paced a tight circle in the center of the room. Paradox and contradiction warred inside him. A thousand different puzzles screamed at him to be picked apart, each so fast and so knotted in with the others that he couldn't hold on to one for long enough to even begin.

He was restless. A little voice wailed inside of him; the same voice that had been screaming at him for hours straight; _hurry, faster, onward_. Any passing moment might be his goddess's last. As a few more of those frantic moments eluded him, it was this, the loudest thought, that he eventually, perhaps foolishly, obeyed. And still, the puzzles screamed.

Nearly unaware of his own movement, Pit had turned, found a ladder built into the same wall he had entered through, and begun climbing. The stumps on his back were throbbing again, and this was the only thing that kept him cognizant that there was indeed a very real, very painful world outside of his own current imaginings.

A part of him had to have figured that whatever room he wound up in was obviously above the one with the tar pit, but marking the gridded map suddenly seemed like a distant and unimportant enterprise. He was still gnawing on the parting remarks that the demon had thrown at him.

Pit had known himself that angels were not morally good by default, as was obvious with Medusa's lot. An individual angel had to adhere to the guidelines of whomever their god or goddess happened to be. Or at least, that was the idea. It was not as if their race was determined; supposedly, it wasn't _impossible_ for an angel to disobey the will of their goddess. However, the punishment for doing so was so severe that almost none of them ever actually tried. Or at least, the punishment _apparently_ was severe. Recalcitrant angels were such a rarity that Pit had never actually witnessed one in his lifetime. Tally and Nil may have spoken of the fates of disloyal angels in hushed tones, but Pit had to admit that he didn't even know what the punishment _was_.

Oh the gods, and Nil. Pit had felt such a rage and a sorrow when his friend stood and opposed him in the name of Medusa. When he had seen him in the antechamber of the Dungeons, his brown eyes stifled with shame and sadness, and his shaking fingers still outstretched from stroking his head, Pit had felt only numbness. He wished that he could bring himself to hate Nil, or to forgive Nil, or (Pal help him) even to forget Nil, but in one way or another, his heart always balked at these options. He was left with only a storm of confusion and profound sadness. What he wouldn't have given for Nil to have belonged to Palutena instead.

It wasn't until he felt himself unconsciously lifting his bow that he realized he had already walked through half of the room-above-the-tar-pit. He had meant not to loose the arrow, but when the spell was broken, it had slipped through his fingers anyway and pierced the chest of a bat. It fell to the ground with a clatter and one sharp, dying wail. Pit felt himself shudder; he also wished he had never found out that those stupid little things actually had souls. He hoped wanly that the demon had been lying, but of course there were the vanishing heart-shaped tokens as well, and Pit wasn't sure what other explanation there possibly could be for _those_.

Killing in the name of peace was a famous contradiction, although Pit had never seriously considered it before now. As eager as he was to leave the underworld, he couldn't kid himself into believing that the overworld would be in good shape. Chly's fervent warnings in council about war and the mortals seemed to keep tapping him on the shoulder. Back then, he had thought privately that Chly was making a ridiculous argument. It was getting harder and harder for him now to remember why he had thought originally why its counter had seemed so good.

A wave of air crashed into Pit's face as a missile flew past him. He froze, jolted at last from his fitful reverie. The threshold of the next room stretched benignly beneath his stiff toes. This was one of the two passages Pit had considered inaccessible when he had stood in the main junction; the upper route, which had been out of his reach. It was dark inside. Light cut the space from three directions; the doorway he stood in, the portal in the floor, and a third on the opposite wall. He wanted very much to look over his shoulder to try and see what had been shot his way, but he was trained well enough as a fighter not to make such a misstep as to allow an opponent a free shot at his back.

He stepped inside and immediately slid to his right. At any moment he expected another of whatever had just been lobbed at him to come sailing over again. It was almost more nerve-wracking when none did.

It was obvious to see that this room was filled with beams and framework. That sort of thing was all over the underworld, and Pit had been trying for quite some time to figure out just what purpose it served. None was apparent, except that beasties liked to hide among it. That thought made his pulse pick up. Although the shadows made it clear that the room was filled with beams, it was harder to tell where in the room they were exactly, or how many.

Pit shuffled quietly along the near wall, reflexively brushing brown hair out of his eyes as if that would help him see. There was a sound from the other end. He stopped immediately and snapped his head around. Darkness, of course, made its source invisible.

He stood completely still for a long time. It wasn't entirely rational, and he was very well aware of that; but on the other hand, he didn't know what he ought to do instead. Obviously there was some malign creature in this room. Obviously that malign creature knew that _he_ was here as well. Obviously he couldn't see it. Not so obvious was whether or not _it_ could see _him_.

He reached out and felt his fingertips brush into a plank of rough, splintery wood. Carefully, he stepped underneath it. There was another rush of air, and Pit heard the framework above him rattle loudly. Whatever was on the other side of the room had decided to start lobbing projectiles at him again. The impact had sounded strangely like a splatter.

Frustration and fury finally broke out of him. He didn't care if he couldn't see this creature. He was tired of the underworld, and he was tired of being mocked and attacked by every living thing in it. To hell with stealth; he was going to leap out and kill this wretched monster. And let it throw its stupid missiles! He might walk away with a few welts and bruises, but that monster was never going to walk again…

Pit ducked under another beam and rushed at the opposing wall. He hadn't expected to catch it, but instead it startled, and he heard it squawking and fumbling away. Behind him and to the sides, he heard more splattering where the missiles exploded against the walls.

Shooting at this monster was going to be a waste of arrows, not that Pit had actually refined such a thought. Wherever he heard it squawking he swatted with his bow. Every single strike was met with the clack of wood against stone, or occasionally against the wooden framework. Its primitive cries were so close to him that it seemed impossible for every attack to be a failure.

Suddenly, he was struck broadside and sent stumbling, manic laughter punctuating the creature's squawks. Pit hadn't even been knocked off his feet, however, and he immediately launched an arrow back. A shriek replaced the laughing. For a moment, Pit thought he might have finally managed to kill it, but then in a howl of fury the creature rushed him. He saw a flash of purple where it passed through one of the sharp squares of light.

Pit staggered backwards. The air right next to his face whooshed as another missile hurled past him. This creature had meleed him before; Pit would have expected for it to try it again. It didn't, however.

He reached behind himself and felt the stone lip of the portal in the floor. Desperately, he lashed out again with his bow. There was a resistance that meant it had cut through more than just air, and for a moment, Pit was elated. A liquid that he had assumed was the monster's blood was running down the length of his bow and was stickying his hands. That was what finally made him stop and stare, mystified, at what soiled his hands and weapon. What he had thought was blood couldn't possibly be, because it was neither warm nor red. It was like the fluids from some kind of fruit, from an—

"Eggplant?" Pit said aloud.

That was his final thought before a missile finally hit him under the chin and he went tumbling backwards.


	9. BARK LIKE A DOG

**Disclaimer:** Yo dawg, I heard you like disclaimers, so I put a disclaimer in your discl(**Disclaimer:** I don't own Kid Icarus.)aimer so you can dodge liability while dodging liability.

**Author's Note**: Oh lawdy, I am really awful about getting these things up. Next time I start a particularly massive story, I'm waiting til I've got a good 5-6 chapter head start before I post it. I mean really. Not that that matters now, since this story already being published. Slowly. So I guess I'll just shut up.

On a related note, hooray college. Expect your already sporadic updates to dwindle to the point of being all but nonexistant.

Also, you know what the difference is between stalactites and stalagmites? Stalac**tites** have to hold on "tight" to the ceiling, or else they'll fall off. Hooray science.

On another fun side-note, Kako is probably my favorite OC. I think it has to do with how cranky she is. But I digress. Here's your chapter:

* * *

All sensation ceased immediately; after the quick whack under the chin, Pit was numb all over, save for his feet. The feeling of them being lifted off the floor was the only clue he had as to what was happening. His vision and hearing had suddenly failed him as well. There was nothing he could have done. He simply fell.

* * *

She walked, one finger extended and running along the stonework. This was the fifth time she would have been around the room, if she was counting properly, and if it was perfectly square like she suspected. It was too dark to see and know for sure.

The tip of her finger was wearing raw from being drug against the stone, but she refused to accept that there were no other exits. If there were no other exits, she would have to go back the way she had come and search again. The idea might not have been so daunting had she not felt so surely that she had already searched every possible route and found nothing. She was fast approaching a place where she would not very well know what she ought to do next.

Suddenly she stopped, and she snorted. "Do whatever feels right," she repeated, derisive. She sucked on her raw fingertip and forced a wry, lonely smile. Pit had conveniently never told her what to do if _nothing_ felt right.

Kako found herself drifting aimlessly back to the center of the room. It was lighter there, because the room above was lit and it filtered down through. That exit above her was the only one. She had been searching the underworld for so long though that going back into the gauntlet sounded a great deal less appealing than crouching in these lonely shadows.

"We'll say that that's what feels right," she said to herself, feeling a little relieved, and she squinted up at the exit just in time to be hit in the face with a falling eggplant.

Of course, she hadn't realized that it was an eggplant right away. It was only when she had rubbed her head and taken a step back and seen it running around in little circles that she knew what it was. And then she began to wonder if she was alright.

For awhile she just sort of sat cross-legged and watched it and wondered what the hell. Briefly, she entertained the idea of killing it. Also high on the list were running away from it, or trying to catch it. Eventually she decided to go with the last idea, mainly because it sounded the most difficult and she was still trying to put off re-exploring the gauntlet for as long as possible.

At first Kako had tried sneaking up on it, stepping softly and generally making a hugely unnecessary fuss. The thing turned out to be just about as stupid as it looked, though, and she snatched it while hardly trying. She was a little disappointed, actually.

The little eggplant was wriggling around in her clutches. Its little feet kicked wildly as if it wondered where the ground had gone. Kako, frankly, was somewhat repulsed, and she kept it at arm's length and scrutinized it with one eye scrunched tight. "What _are_ you," she wondered aloud.

As the last word crossed her lips, the eggplant instantly became ridiculously heavy. It happened so fast that she couldn't save herself from falling forward and landing on top of—

"_Pit_!" she spat, and scurried backwards immediately.

Pit, if anything, was even more astonished, and he just sort of lay in a dazed pile on the ground.

Although no less surprised, Kako had somehow managed to regain her composure. "Why were you an eggplant?" she asked in the most even way possible.

Pit never actually answered that for her, opting instead to carefully sit up and hold his head.

"You were an eggplant," Kako said again, hoping it was helpful.

"Kako," he said after awhile, "what on Earth are you doing down here?"

"Listening to _your_ orders!" she barked back at him, and prodded him in the chest.

"What are you talking about," he grumbled, swatting her away.

She flailed a hand at the opening to their dark room. "Back in the skyworld! You _specifically_ told me to go and do whatever I thought was right!"

Pit was kneading his brow again. He had a headache. "Kako, that's about the most _unspecific_ order anybody could have possibly given."

"Well, good job issuing it, _hero_! I've been all _over_ the place trying to patch up hurt angels! And this war's no sissy fight, I'll tell you that much, kid. I've seen some real grody shit on some of 'em, and—"

Over the pounding of his own pulse, Pit was cognizant enough to at least recognize an obvious discrepancy. "Wait, why are you doing that? Kako, I thought you were a dispatcher."

If she had been angered by his earlier comments, this one infuriated her. "Please, _Captain_, I know the goddess does love her fighting one-trick ponies, but as for the rest of us, it pays to have a more _variable_ skill set. I was originally trained as a nurse. But, in times of peace when we're not all dropping out of the sky in droves, it makes more sense for me to do something more _relevant_, like dispatching. Just because _you're_ too much of a war-monkey to differentiate between peace and chaos doesn't mean that the _rest_ of us are incapable of leveling such judgments."

"Kako," he said with a sigh, still clutching his head, "for Zeus's sake, I wasn't admonishing you. I had just never known you were a nurse."

She had been about to keep ranting, but when she heard that, she stopped and was quiet. For a long while they stayed that way. It was dark, and Pit couldn't make her out very well, but he could tell that Kako was watching him.

"Is your head okay?"

"It might be if you'd shut up already."

She was quiet again for awhile.

"You said you were helping hurt angels, right?" he asked once his head had stopped pounding so much.

"I thought you wanted me to shut up!"

"Oh, come on, Kako. I'm trying to find out if you helped Ban."

"No," she said simply. But then she added, "I didn't know he was hurt."

"Could you go and help him?"

She looked at him appraisingly, or at least, Pit supposed that she was. "Of course I can," she said finally. "But we've got to get out of here first, Captain."

"I've got a map." He rattled the paper in the darkness so she would know he wasn't lying. Kako sighed.

"Fine then, Pit. Let's get out of here." She moved underneath the ceiling ladder and braced herself for the jump up, crouching low and spreading her wings. Before she could raise an outcry, Pit quickly muttered, "Gimme a boost real quick, would ya, Kako," and he clambered onto her shoulders and leapt off, catching the bottom rung. Kako, thankfully, was not much more surprised by this than any other development of the past ten minutes, and after dusting herself off, she flew up and alighted in the main chamber of the labyrinth.

Pit was slow, and she was impatient. She paced around the entrance to the floor chamber until she was too restless even for that, and then she leaned down and stuck her hand out for him.

He was lingering on purpose. This was the moment he had been dreading since he had found Kako. There was no getting around it, however. He looked up as he climbed closer, and watched as her expression changed from annoyance to concern to abject horror.

She took his wrist wordlessly and pulled him up the rest of the way. Her eyes were red, but she was wiping them too fast for any tears to linger. She kept her head down. Pit didn't know what to say to her, and so he chose to not say anything. Many tense minutes passed, and finally Kako looked up at him again. She had taken a thick role of gauze from a pouch at her hip and was fumbling it in her hands. "Turn around," she said in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper.

He did, and he sat cross-legged on the ground. Kako sat behind him and gently bandaged the nubs of his wings.

Pit traced the grout lines of the floor tile with his index finger. His wings smarted, but Kako was being gentler than he would have thought anybody was capable, least of all her. He was grateful, extremely grateful, but his relationship with Kako had never been anything other than mutual dislike, and he didn't know what to say. Eventually he settled on small talk.

"How did you wind up in the underworld, Kako?"

She gave a wavering sigh, and after a moment answered, "I snuck in the entrance, past Twinbellows. I heard the demons talking in the overworld. They said that Medusa was having her prisoners maimed. I was coming to help them." She swallowed, and her voice broke. "I didn't know you were one of them."

After that, he was at a loss for words again.

He felt a final, snarling tug and the last bit of his wing was bandaged. "Alright then," Kako said as he turned around, and he saw that she was still carefully avoiding his eyes. Awkwardly, she added, "I suppose you'd better let me see that map, Captain."

Pit handed it to her, and Kako unfurled it against the floor. She stared at it for a few moments, brow scrunched, but then she exclaimed, "This isn't so bad!"

"Oh yeah?"

"That's right," she put her hand out and gestured impatiently for the stick of charcoal. Pit handed it to her, and she quickly set to marking off rooms. "This one has to be the exit, of course, since it's the last one at the top of the map. And once we know that, really, it's easy." She pointed to a square about four rows below the one she had marked as their exit. "This is where we are right now. It's the only room that has a portal on every single wall. Easy, right? Up and out!"

"Fantastic," Pit said, squinting upwards towards the dark room where the Eggplant Wizard lurked, "as long as it's not _straight_ up and out."

The going wasn't really any easier, but it did seem to be, if for no other reason than because they knew now exactly where they needed to be going. Pit was just glad that Kako was keeping back during the monster scuffles and wasn't getting in his way by trying to help.

The room they found themselves in now was gray. Pit walked forward, but Kako lingered uncertainly by the entrance. He turned back to her quizzically, and she said, "This is the last room before the antechamber."

"So what?"

"Twinbellows."

The underworld's greatest guardian, of course. The living were not allowed into the subterranean dungeons of the dead, and the dead were not permitted to leave them. Twinbellows, the great two-headed dog who stood constantly at the portal between, ensured that these things never happened.

"Maybe we can sneak past him again, like you did to find your way in."

Kako was already shaking her head. "I _flew_ over him, Pit."

Pit was aggravated. "Then I'll kill him."

"You do know that he's made out of fire, right?"

Pit rolled his eyes and stomped across the final tomb of the underworld.

A jet of smoke was coiling up from a crack in the wall. The scents of sulfur and charcoal were heavy in the air. It had been uncomfortably hot in the coiling atrium of the underworld, but here the heat rose in wriggling clear lines and settled wetly on Pit's face. He was breathing heavily, and at first he thought the sound was only him, but as he moved closer it grew deeper and louder until it couldn't possibly have been any real creature at all. The portal he peered through had smooth and smoldered edges of melted stone. He looked carefully, straining his heat-addled eyes towards the center of the room. There, lying sprawled and sleeping on the floor, was a massive bear of a creature, its body glowing in flickering tones of orange and gold.

Even at this distance, its voice was incredible. Pit could feel the tiny rocks trembling beneath his feet from the snores of the great monster. He watched with mounting horror as one of its heads lolled to the side and stretched its muscled jaws in a toothy yawn. The tongue was forked. A little belch of sparks and fire danced in its throat.

Pit wasn't sure how useful his little wooden arrows would be against such a creature, but if ever there was a time to try and kill it, it was now, as it slept. He took a step through the fire-blasted entryway, but no sooner had his sole touched the rock did he feel his shoulders get yanked backwards.

He had expected that it was Kako being stupid, but instead he was very surprised to find the centurion that Zeus had freed what felt like an eternity ago.

"Captain Pit!" he said, "I was waiting here for you to arrive!"

"I thought you were long gone," Pit said, raising his eyebrows, "What on earth held you back?"

He had been being sarcastic, but as it happened the centurion had a good answer for him. He nodded eagerly, and beckoned Pit back over to the entrance. Pit glanced at Kako, who merely shrugged.

The centurion tapped his hand and pointed far off to the side of the room, at a group of stalagmites. "There," he whispered, "do you see it?"

Pit squinted. "What's that, now?"

"You see that rock that's shaped like an hourglass? Look between it and the one that's almost perfectly round."

His eyes fell on something that glinted against the light cast by Twinbellows and the bottom dropped out of his stomach. "What is that?"

"War spoils," the centurion answered him, a note of distaste very clear. "Medusa figures she's won already. She's stolen our treasures."

_The sacred treasures_, Pit thought, _those were what Tally was in charge of. _What had she told him about them? "Those treasures are weapons," Pit whispered to the centurion, "If we can get them back, it might make it easier for us to defeat Medusa."

The centurion was nodding. "Right, right. What do you want to do, then?"

Pit carefully craned his neck back towards the sweltering den of Twinbellows. The beast's chest expanded and contracted with the force of its sultry breaths. He turned to Kako. "Is Twinbellows a heavy sleeper?"

"He'll be awake by the time you've taken two steps."

Pit's heart sank, but he gestured again to the centurion. "What's your name?"

"Tare, Captain."

"Alright, Tare. Here's what we're going to do." He took him by the shoulder and led him to the other side of the entrance. "You're going to go in first, fly up to the ceiling, and then wait there. When I come in, I'll cut around to the right. I'll be able to hold Twinbellows off for awhile. But while he's distracted, you swoop down and get that treasure, and then finish him off with that, alright?"

Tare was already nodding, and without another word he opened his wings and took off into Twinbellows' chamber. Pit's heart stood still for a moment as the great beast growled and flexed its toes, but Twinbellows' trigger was apparently the ringing of feet against the pavement, and he remained asleep.

Pit nocked an arrow. "Wish me luck," he whispered to Kako.

He had expected something a little more reassuring than her reply of "Just don't get _completely_ charred. I haven't got that much gauze."

Trying not to allow that idea to marinate, Pit leapt without another word into the sweltering cavern of Twinbellows. His eyes stayed on the golden dog, and as his footsteps echoed off of the stone walls, its noses twitched and its four eyes slowly opened. Pit was running right in front of him.

This very well could be the only easy shot he would get. Pit let the arrow fly, and it knocked Twinbellows in the lip. That head yelped. The other fixed its gaze on Pit immediately and let out a rock-shaking growl. Smoke gushed from his nostrils and from in between his teeth.

The beast got to its feet. Where it had been laying was a molten indent in the rock, still softly glowing orange. Bits of magma fell from its pelt and smoldered. Pit was still shooting at it, but he was rattled now, and the arrows shattered against the rock at Twinbellows' feet.

Twinbellows lunged, and Pit dove to the side, feeling the heat wash over him. He fired an arrow that stuck to the beast's nose. It barked in pain, but the arrow ignited immediately and burnt away to nothing. Pit kept leaping backwards and shooting arrows, and soon Twinbellows' faces and chest were covered in flaming barbs, but they all disappeared seconds later in little snorts of gray smoke. And Twinbellows became merely angrier.

The jaws of one head snapped continuously at his feet, but the other kept back. Pit watched, horrified, as a spinning marble of red began to grow in the agape mouth of that head. Twinbellows snorted, and the fireball came hissing past Pit, singing the hem of his tunic. He slapped the fire out and shot another arrow.

Tare the centurion at least was following his orders. Through a thick veil of black smoke and twisting heat-lines, Pit saw him carefully circling the stalagmites and smoldered rocks as he tried to find a good place to get at the sacred artifact. He hadn't been able to see from the entrance, but the treasure was locked in a heavy casket. Pit's heart sank.

Twinbellows was stomping and slashing at Pit now, and some of his arrows stuck in the pads of its feet. The beast's growls all the while rose in a crescendo of pitch and power until they were demonic, discordant screeches. The muscles in Pit's arms and legs convulsed. Twinbellows' unworldly shriek was paralyzing him.

Tare had landed awkwardly on top of the tilted casket and was prying desperately at the lid. He was beginning to panic, and in his struggle couldn't force the box out from the rocks in which it was wedged. He twisted his fingers around the handles and braced his feet against a stalagmite and pushed. The casket didn't budge. The stalagmite, however, shattered.

The cavern had suddenly become eerily quiet. Twinbellows' screech had faded to only a ghostly ringing in their ears. Both flaming heads had turned and fixed on the centurion and the treasure.

The fireball left the monster's mouth before the words could leave Pit's. "TARE, FLY!" There was a sickly plume of smoke where he once had stood, but beyond that it was impossible to see.

In that instant Pit understood a very nasty and unsettling truth. Twinbellows had only been playing with him before. It had used its full power against Tare because only then had there been any actual threat. One head turned back around to Pit, a fireball already swirling in its opened jaws.

He didn't think. He immediately shot the head, straight in the mouth, straight through the fireball. What happened next Pit could never have predicted. A look of pain and horror had crossed the eyes of that head. The fireball had died immediately in a cloud of sparks and smoke. Bits of magma dripped from the roof of the wounded mouth, sizzling where they landed on the ground. The corresponding legs of the wounded head convulsed and grappled with the floor. Twinbellows' other half watched this destruction in shock.

Eventually the scuttle of desperate claw on stone faded. One head lolled, its jaws dangling open rottenly. The eyes had rolled back. Already the fire on that side was starting to die, revealing the knotted, blackened, burn-scarred flesh underneath.

For awhile, the unhurt half of Twinbellows was quiet. It stared at its dead counterpart uncomprehendingly, even reaching down and nosing at the wasted foot. Pit suddenly remembered what the demon had said about monster's souls and felt sick to himself.

Twinbellows suddenly threw its head back and screamed. It was a sound of rage and pain and hate, and when it lowered its burning eyes back down to Pit he felt quite sure that he was about to die. A spout of magma ran from its opened mouth and splashed hissing against the stone. Pit turned and ran as fast as he could.

The beast could not pursue him as easily as before, of course; it was half-dead and half-crippled. One front and one hind leg were drug along the floor as the other two worked desperately. And they did a fair job. Twinbellows spat fire in any direction its head turned, and it did not take long for most of the room to be ablaze in shaking reds and yellows. Pit kept stepping backwards to escape to the bits of floor that were still habitable.

Twinbellows was furious, but it had still seen how its other half had perished, and the beast was not being stupid. It could have finished Pit off much more quickly if it had spat fire straight at him instead of sweeping him with blasts. That, however, would have required that it exposed its soft mouth. This seemed to be a risk that Twinbellows refused to take again.

Sweat ran so thickly over Pit that his bow was slipping out of his hands. It was fast becoming impossible to find a place where he could still stand. Every step was met with a screaming coal to the sole of his foot, a blast of crippling heat up the side of his body. He still fired arrows, but most of these burned into the sweltering air even before they ever came close to the monster.

Across the room he saw a single bare patch of still-solid rock, a lone island in a sea of magma. It was so far. Twinbellows was turning back to him now, the hot rock still pouring from its mouth, and Pit realized that this was his only hope. If he stayed where he was, he would soon be obliterated.

He crouched down as the stream of fire approached him again. The hot rock was searing his wrists and ankles, but he stayed in poise. Moments before Twinbellows' attack landed, he launched himself from his last place of safety. Even after the huge ascent of the underworld, Pit never missed his wings more than during that jump over the fire.

His knees knocked against the burning floor, but he pulled himself upright and scrambled to the safe spot. Twinbellows hadn't found him yet; it was still staring uncomprehendingly at the spot where Pit had just been, wondering perhaps why the screams and the smell of burning flesh were absent.

It was now or never. Pit shot an arrow, and without the plume of heat gushing from the monster's jaws, it actually met Twinbellows' face. The shot took it by surprise. Twinbellows stumbled backwards, screaming with its mouth open wide. Pit took aim at the writhing forked tongue and shot a final arrow. And then, with a last growl of pain and hatred, Twinbellows finally fell.

The only sound was the fire, but it too was dying. The rock floor of the room was cooling to a mere glow. Pit stepped cautiously out across it, giving Twinbellows' blackened remains a wide berth.

For a while, he only stood and stared at the dead creature, but eventually he realized that a white-faced Kako had come up next to him. He almost expected that she would find some way to admonish him, but all she said, stupidly, was, "You did it."

He didn't reply, so she asked, "What about that centurion? Tare?"

Pit felt something drop in his stomach. Swallowing hard, he beckoned her over to where the treasure casket had been wedged.

Tare was alive, but badly burned. The brass armor had protected everything but his hands, feet, and wings. He breathed heavily, staring in wide-eyed horror at the blistered flesh on his palms. Many of his feathers had burned away to soot, but the wings themselves seemed to be in decent shape.

Kako crouched down, took one of his hands from him, and began wrapping it thickly in gauze.

He stared at Pit blankly, and finally managed, "I failed, Captain. I-I'm sorry."

Pit's mouth was dry, but he forced a rebuttal. "The dog died. We didn't. It's not a failure, soldier."

As if he needed to reassure himself that it was true, the centurion looked up slowly at Twinbellows' carcass. When his eyes didn't return, Pit looked up at it as well.

It was gone. In its place was a pool of steely, clear water. He watched for a while longer, and at first he thought he was imagining it, but the water began slowly to glow. Pit walked up and looked down. There was the clear image of Zeus, shaking his head in annoyance.

"And here I thought Hades would have my head just because you were _in_ the underworld. How do you expect me to tell him that you killed his blasted dog?"

Pit took a moment to comprehend what Zeus had just said, and then replied, articulately and disbelievingly. "Well, you could tell dear Mr. Hades that his blasted dog was trying to _kill_ us."

Zeus snorted. "That's what the thing was _there_ for. If you find a giant two-headed dog made out of fire and _don't_ immediately realize that it's there to kill you, I'd call it a failure on _your _part." The god of gods stepped back a moment and squinted at him. "And whazzis? Did you just say 'we?' Kid, who else is crazy enough to wanna stomp through this godforsaken dungeon with you?"

"Zeus," Pit said, ignoring him, "whose side are you _on_?"

Zeus considered that question for a moment, hemming and hawing, and eventually he said, "Well, it is pretty impressive."

"Yeah?"

"And I gotta be honest. I always hated that damn dog."

"Uh-huh?"

"So tell ya what. I'll do ya a favor." Before Pit could get a word in, though, he added quickly, "But don't you go asking me to fry Medusa again or fix your buffalo-chicken-wings. I said I'd do ya a _favor_, not a miracle. I mean, all you did was kill a dog."

Pit was indignant. "It had two heads. And was made out of _fire_."

Zeus shrugged. "Still, it was just a dog. Now, you gonna name something reasonable, or are you gonna leave this up to me again, just like last time?"

Pit hadn't noticed that he'd sat cross-legged next to the pool, but he began kneading his brow and glancing around, thinking hard. When the big picture was so clear, it was harder to come up with something smaller to ask for, especially when he knew he was asking an omniscient being. His eyes passed over Kako, who was helping Tare back onto his feet, and they settled on the casket.

He hadn't gotten a deep look at it, but he'd seen it well enough to realize that he would be unable to open it with force alone. The wood had to be enchanted to not ignite from Twinbellows' rage. There was a golden keyhole in the latch, but Pit hadn't seen any keys in the room. Perhaps the keys were hidden somewhere else. And suddenly he knew exactly what to ask for.

"Could you hold something for me, Zeus?"

Zeus' eyebrows rose in surprise. "Oh?"

"That's right," Pit cried back at him, running over towards the casket. Zeus had his face pressed right against the water's underside, trying to peek up and see what he was doing. Tare and Kako watched curiously as he broke away the stalagmites around the base of the treasure and began shoving it back to the pool. "Not forever though, of course," Pit wheezed, "Soon as I find the keys, I'll want this back."

"Keys?" Zeus was still squinting along the surface of the water. "What keys? Boy, what are you talking about?"

The pool couldn't have been more than an inch deep, but as soon as the edge of the casket passed into it, it capsized like a tanker and vanished completely. Pit watched with profound happiness as a look of surprise crossed Zeus' features and he was hit under the chin with the falling treasure.

"So that's all," Pit said with a huff. "Certainly no miracle, right?"

His voice muffled from under the heavy box, Zeus grumbled in reply, "It's a miracle I'm not killing you, anyway."


End file.
